What Do Your Employees Want?

All business owners know that unhappy employees can be like a cancer. Their willingness to complain and bad mouth the business is infectious and foments discord quickly. But keeping employees happy (and, theoretically, making better employees) is an art, not a science. And it’s not all about the money. In fact, sometimes the more money you throw at a problem, the worse the problem becomes.

So what to do? What can you do make your employees genuinely happy? Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School (and former editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review) has five suggestions upon which you focus:

• Flexibility — Allow employees to have flexibility with their jobs allows them to match their work with their life needs;

• Certainty — Surprises — even pleasant surprises — can create a feeling of uncertainty and no one likes to be uncertain;

• Opportunity — Dead end jobs lead people to dead ends and who likes a dead end?

• Belonging — Being part of something matters. It could be something minor or something major — both carry significance to those who embrace it; and

• Meaning — Is the job just a paycheck or does it hold some higher meaner of some sort?

Obviously, no job is going to be all things to all people. But ask yourself when the last time was that you thought of these things. If you can’t remember, then you need to change that.

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