20 Jan Employee Relations

Originally posted by United Benefit Advisors (UBA)

Co-Worker Relationships More Important Than Supervisor Relationships

As an employee, we tend to be more engaged at work if we like the people we work with rather than the people we work for.  According to a survey from TINYpulse, relationships among co-workers are more responsible for their happiness than their managerial relationships by 23.3%!

These co-worker interactions, it seems, are not centered on being the same as each other.  You don’t need to have the same problems, your kids don’t need to play on the same team, and you don’t need to go to the same place of worship.  What you do need to have, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), are the traits of team play and collaboration.  These proved to be far more desirable than knowledge and skills.

“This shows that who you work with is becoming more important than who you work for,” said David Niu, founder and CEO of TINYpulse.  “We often think of employee happiness and satisfaction as being manager-driven, but now as the workplace becomes more cross-matrixed, collaborative and ‘bottom-up,’ the importance of co-worker relationships continues to grow.”

All these working relations aside, the absolute most important factor of employee engagement is management transparency.  According to the survey by TINYpulse, workers are demanding transparency in their leadership including roles, responsibilities, and values as well as their company’s missions and strategies.

Whether you’re a C-level manager or a supervisor who is further down the ladder, it costs virtually nothing to improve your level of transparency.  How high your employees value this factor will vary, but what remains constant is the improvement in trust that’s fostered and the advantage in employee productivity and retention.