From the course: How to Support Your Employees' Well-Being

Your role in your employees' well-being

From the course: How to Support Your Employees' Well-Being

Your role in your employees' well-being

- The evidence is compelling. The employees who feel more stress are much less likely to perform well at work. This evidence comes from multiple different disciplines and I can assure you that from the perspective of the brain, if you have people who are consistently experiencing negative stress, then you will not be getting the best from them. So what does that mean for you if you want to be a great manager? Well, to get that high performance, you need to set the conditions for a high performing neural environment. Translation, reduce the stress that you create as a manager and utilize feedback and appreciation to foster productivity and well-being. Remember clearly the first time I realized how impactful managers are. My mum worked in a people referral unit for young people who were expelled from school and the teachers were really dedicated, believing in these students and wanting to help them to have a good start in life so they'd put up with being stopped by conferences or having to chase the runaway students daily but around 50% of them were off with stress at any point, why? Dealing with the managers. Both science and experience give us insights here. In a survey from 2019 by CIPD in conjunction with Simply Help, they found that management style was one of the top three causes of employee stress. And with stress being such a strong driver of poor mental health, you need to be making sure that your behavior is helping to reduce stress rather than enhance it. As a manager, you don't just impact the way people feel by levels of stress but also whether they will actually stay in their job or not. Evidence shows that when it comes to if someone decides to stay in the job, their manager is often a reason close to the top of that list. Your goal is to build a team culture of feedback, positivity and productivity. At Synaptic Potential, we link this to building a high performing neural environment, a space where people's brains have the most helpful networks and chemicals activated. Let's look at the steps that you can take to get there. Acknowledge and appreciate your people as their whole self not just their role. Does this mean that you should tell people that they're amazing all the time, a 100% not. Humans want to be seen, heard and acknowledged as opposed to just being fed empty praise. If you can give your people focused attention and let them know that you recognize what they're doing, you're interested in them then you are building some of the critical foundations the well-being and high-performance. Deliver good quality feedback. This might seem obvious and maybe you think, well, I already do that but there is a huge difference between feedback and quality feedback. The top three things to build on as a manager giving feedback are one, the foundational relationship that you're giving feedback within. If you have a poor relationship, any feedback will fall on deaf ears. Two, is positive energy, by this I don't mean that the content needs to be positive, it's vital that there are areas for development mentioned but we need things shared in a positive way, a way that conveys your belief in the person that you value them as a human that you know that there are particular behaviors that they can improve on. And finally, three is all about their autonomy. Make sure your feedback links to their ability to do something different that it's within their control. Taking a look at your focus, how you acknowledge people and how you offer them feedback are great starting places to gain an insight into whether you're having a positive impact or a negative one.

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