What is a Working Environment and its features?
Working Environment mainly refers to the working conditions along with the working atmosphere that helps the employees to adapt to the organization. Get involved in the affairs of the organization, understand their surroundings properly, and perform their duties well. While a positive working environment can boost the morale of the employees, a negative working environment can demotivate them.
There are features like work and work activities, training, health and safety, work-life balance, and some non-pay aspects like leaves/breaks, lighting, and ventilation of the workplace, disciplinary procedures, etc. Together contribute to the working environment. If one of these features is not correct or not placed properly or is disliked by any one particular employee, it can easily turn the positive working environment into a negative working environment.
Many researchers have found that employee engagement is something produced by the factors of the working environment. Each factor has its impact on the employees and as such on employee engagement as well. The following points will give us a clear picture of how a peaceful environment influences employee engagement.
How does the working environment affect employee engagement?
Employee engagement is influenced by the following factors related to the working environment:
Job satisfaction
This is one of the most important aspects of an employee’s sentiments. Job satisfaction revolves around the fact about how satisfied an employee is with his place of work. The relationship between the employee and his co-workers, the employee, and the management, and with the company itself, influences the sense of belongingness towards the organization. How easily he can perform his daily tasks also shows how satisfied he is with his work and the workplace. The salary structure, other benefits, and an opportunity for career growth are other factors that affect satisfaction. The more satisfied an employee is, the more engaged he will be.
Meaning and purpose of peaceful working environment
when an individual employee can understand how his specific role fits into the team’s goals- especially fitting into the bigger picture i.e. the company’s long-term vision—the employee feels more fulfilled as he finds his work meaningful. This makes him more interested in his work and thus more engaged. By adding meaning to employees’ jobs the organization moves in the direction of improving employee engagement.
Then there are factors like customer satisfaction. When an employee understands the impact his work has on somebody’s life, he understands the purpose of his work.
By providing mentor organization, companies ensure counseling tips and career counseling to develop career and improving on-the-job training companies make sure their employees are far more engaged and far more likely to stay on board for a long period of time.
Culture:
the culture of an organization also has an impact on employee engagement in several different ways. If the culture is energetic, positive, and welcoming, the employees are likely to be more engaged in comparison to a culture that is negative and stressful. If the management has an effective system of rewarding outstanding employees with bonuses and cash rewards. It becomes a fair and effective way for management to show appreciation for hard-working employees. This stimulates productivity and engagement as employees are more engaged when they fit the company culture.
The digital work experience:
advanced technology and modernization are making organizations more and more digital, which means digital work experience is an important part of an employee’s various experiences that he gathers in the workplace. By modernizing its IT tools and infrastructure, improving digital on-boarding and training facilities, and by creating a business function. It is dedicated to managing and improving employee experience. This also providing them digital experience an organization improves employee engagement. This also includes assessing employees’ digital engagement levels, which in turn helps in finding the problem areas and by finding solutions to these problems further enhancing employee engagement.
Career development opportunities
as briefly mentioned earlier, career development is becoming very important for the present age workers. The increase in the levels of competition makes the employees nervous, at times even bored with their present jobs and they start seeking other jobs. A solution to this problem is providing career counseling, offering mentorship and apprenticeship opportunities. By ensuring that the new employees understand that they have the potential for promotions. There will be ample opportunities for them to be promoted, their careers will grow while they work in the organization because of the training facilities, the organization sees to it that the employees stay engaged, and stay on with the organization for a long time.
The working environment
we started this discussion by saying that the work environment has a lot of effect on employee engagement levels. However, some factors are not related to the physical workplace but still come under the working environment and influence employee engagement. These factors include the culture, atmosphere, climate, employees’ attitudes, and behavior. The attitude and behavior of the management or the leadership, the work experiences, etc. All these factors can sometimes have a collective negative or positive impact on the workers. There can be times when any one of these factors creates a positive or negative effect on the workers. The positive impact will improve employee engagement, while the negative impact will force the employees to abandon the organization looking for other jobs that have a better working environment.
Transparency and Honesty
having a transparent and honest work environment is the need of the hour. If the workplace has a lot of gossip, complaints, politics among employees, workers are not comfortable working in such conditions. As they feel stressed and hence disengage. An organizational set-up where employees can talk freely with the management, have a serious discussion about a matter that has been bothering them for quite some time, is one which encourages employee engagement. The employees feel comfortable at work and feel connected with the organization.
Autonomy
employees should have the freedom to tackle small problems on their own. The need to approach their seniors for everything, big or small often bothers the employees. A little responsibility on the shoulders of the employees helps. As they can think out of the box, make creative contributions to work and they are the ones who achieve excellence in the work. They are the ones who stay engaged with the organization for a long time.
Inspiration
people always need inspiration regardless of their field. Get inspiration by someone means get motivation. When the employees have the motivation or inspiration at work. They can solve the problems very easily and even create faster and easier ways to complete the tasks assigned to them. This makes the work enjoyable and stress-free. When the employees enjoy what they do they feel satisfied and hence totally engaged.
Communication in a working environment
this is one of the most important factors contributing to employee engagement in today’s world. An organizational structure which has happy employees as their managers are not threatening or screaming at them. There is no peer pressure, rather there are one-to-one meetings, employees can give their suggestions. They get feedback from managers to drive performance, i.e. to say that there is proper communication at all the levels of the organization. The employee engagement levels are expected to be very high. Happy employees are supposed to be highly engaged.
Management and leadership
leadership and management have a very important role to play in employee engagement. An effective leadership commands respect among the employees and they listen and follow their leaders. Proper management creates a healthy atmosphere in the organization influencing the performance of the employees, improves productivity, and enhances employee engagement. Poor management, on the other hand, creates confusion among the employees. The work culture suffers and thus employees disengage.
Conclusion
Looking at various factors that influence the working environment we may conclude that if an organization has to function and achieve success. It needs to value its employees i.e. have high levels of employee engagement. For achieving employee engagement it needs to create a peaceful work environment with all the factors related to the workplace. Contributing in a positive manner without employees will neither be productive nor active nor disciplined. This will result in a total loss for the organization.
