How to Help Your Employees Learn from Each Other
You reach your office and open up your mailbox. You receive an email from your Finance Head informing you about your business, not doing good. As you scroll down, you see a few emails from your Human Resource Department informing you about some of your employees not getting along well. To add to that, you observe a tense environment in your office.
Will you first lookout ways to improve your organization’s growth, or will you first try to fix the organization’s environment?
Well, if I had been in your situation, I would do the latter first. I understand that being the head of an organization is no easy job. So here is a list of seven ways you can make sure your employees get along with each other well, and as a result, they can learn something from one another.
A Safe Environment
It is most important to provide a safe and open environment for your employees where they feel free to voice out their concerns and problems. Moreover, they must be assured that their concerns will be heard and understood by the organization and their colleagues. For this, you, as an employer, will need to set some rules where confidentiality, honesty, and integrity between the employees are maintained.
Once all of this is established, then only your employees can open up to each other, seek guidance, share their work problems, seek solutions for those problems, and understand each other’s situations. This way, everyone will make sure that they are not mocking or embarrassing their co-workers in front of others.
Appoint a Facilitator/Mentor and Teach
Having a good support system at work always help employees to perform better, especially when it is a software development company. Therefore, if you want your employees to learn from each other, you will have to introduce a “Have a Buddy at Work” program for a set period of time, where each of your employees can have their “facilitator” or a “Mentor” to whom they can share their problems, seek solutions, de-stress themselves. On the other hand, the facilitator must be able to bridge the gap between you and your partner employee.
Networking
The third most important factor to make sure your employees learn from each other is that they should network. By that, I mean, they should socialize with one another to get comfortable around each other.
They can do so by adding their co-workers to their social media sites, have learning group sessions, attend networking events either organized by your organization or any other organizations, or simply their facilitators can help them meet other co-workers either from other departments or from their departments.
Team-Building Activities
What better way can it be to make sure your employees learn from each other than the team-building activities? It is crucial to an organization’s growth to have a positive and productive working environment. Most of the time, you will face the issue of a few employees not getting along well, and that might hinder your workload. I am sure you would not want this to happen to your organization.
To combat such situations and make sure that your employees get along with each other well, you will need to engage them in either brainstorming sessions, outdoor immersions or in-house activities that will foster flexibility, motivation, better communication, ability to manage complex solutions, critical thinking, decision-making skills and so on.
Another plus point, your employees might stay for longer durations rather than taking early resignations.
Focus on Real-World Situations
Another great way of making sure that your employees learn from each other is to put them in real-world situations. You can do that either through team-building activities or through “have a buddy program.”
Having problem-solving skills can make a difference not only in critical work situations but when interacting with one another. Your employees can better their skills by participating in solving each other’s problems, be it related to work or their personal life.
Recognize Success
When someone appreciates your work, you feel motivated and tend to perform better. To make sure that your organization has a positive working environment, it is really necessary to encourage your employees to always appreciate their co-workers for their every milestone achieved.
This will help them open up with each other, eliminate competition because every individual works at their own pace and will enforce a positive approach towards their work.
Allow Collaboration
Another way your employees can learn from each other is to collaborate. Their partners can be from a different domain or a different team. They can exchange their expertise and knowledge with those who are struggling with their tasks. Remember, having different perspectives and opinions to approach a certain task is equally necessary to ensure growth.
Final Thoughts
Running an organization comes with lots of responsibilities. Since your employees are driving your business forward, it is really necessary to focus on them and their well-being. You can do so in various ways, such as providing them with a safe environment, arranging networking sessions, encouraging collaborations, initiating team-building activities, and “Have a Buddy” program, and so on.
I hope this content has added some value to your knowledge, and you will certainly implement a few of these ways, if not all, to make employees part of your organization’s success and growth.