Emotional intelligence is one of the new buzzwords in the business world. For business owners and leaders, EQ in the workplace is a great opportunity to bring the best out of employees. As businesses look to deliberate on strategies for high employee engagement and better employee retention, cultivating EQ in the workplace can be a promising tactic.
In fact, in the modern workplace, EQ is being rated higher than IQ as a prerequisite for success.
To substantiate, as per SavofNs Sapience, 59 percent of employers are not interested in hiring candidates that have low EQ despite high IQ. To add, as per PR Newswire, 95 percent of HR managers are of the opinion that it is imperative for employees to have emotional intelligence.
This is a crucial insight for startups looking to expand their workforce! Hiring in EQ will be a smarter approach to taking your small business to the next level. In fact, it is also true that people with high EQ draw higher salaries than people with low EQ.
95% of HR managers think that it’s more important for employees to have high EQ than high IQ.
This is for the simple reason that many employers and human resource managers genuinely believe that people with high EQ add incredible value to an organisation.
If that was not the case, people with high EQ would not be earning more than others! In multifaceted ways, EQ can make your employees better assets for the company hence making greater contributions to organisational growth.
Having said that, you need to work on some organisational changes to train your employees in emotional intelligence and model it for them. Answers to all your questions around employee motivation, engagement, commitment, and retention lie in emotional intelligence.
This blog sheds light on the ways in which EQ can make your workforce more accomplished and help them in staying upbeat at all times.
Individuals with high emotional intelligence manifest a great deal of self-awareness. This implies that they are aware of their core strengths and abilities. As a business leader, you can attest to how important it is for people to believe in themselves and be aware of their capabilities.
Self-awareness also helps individuals acknowledge their shortcomings and improve on them.
As you can see, self-awareness can add immense clarity to the minds of individuals and make them far more efficient. Moreover, self-awareness will enable your employees to feel confident in achieving their goals and be open to learning new skills to work on problem areas. They will also be more aware of their performance parameters and whether their efforts are aligned to organisational objectives.
Self-awareness adds more depth to decision-making, innovation, self-regulation, leadership qualities, and adaptability to changes.
Needless to say, the greater the innovation endorsed by startups, the greater the competitive advantage they can gain. Increased self-awareness can also help employees to be more creative in their approach and think outside the box. All in all, acute self-awareness will promote active engagement at work among employees driven by self-belief.
Empathy is a core virtue of emotional intelligence and with empathy, employees can understand each other’s feelings and forge cordial relationships among themselves. After all, sometimes all that an employee wants is that their colleagues comprehend and value their emotions. Any workforce is quite synonymous with the construct of a family. Given that, if relationships are positive and firm, the productivity of your employees will remain high at all times.
In a workplace where people have high EQ, employees will have a sense of psychological safety.
They will know that if there are emotional vulnerabilities bothering them, they can discuss these with their co-workers or manager. Such strong interdependence and trust among employees will lay a reliable foundation for high employee engagement and high retention. Further, it will lead to lower absenteeism and a more vibrant work environment, bringing out the best in everyone.
As a business leader, you already know how salient workplace relationships are to the morale of any workforce. Constant workplace conflicts can derail an organisation. In fact, as per a report by CPP Global,
Companies in the US lose more than $350 billion per year to workplace conflicts.
As you can see, EQ can save your organisation from such unnecessary losses. The greater the empathy at your workplace, the lesser will be the prospects of disputes and gross conflicts.
Business organisations all across the globe lay great emphasis on the need to keep employees’ motivation intact. They have realised that productivity is not a measure of job satisfaction, but of the motivation and engagement employees carry. Motivated teams can achieve even the most insurmountable tasks and set great examples.
Having said that, businesses are not hesitant to innovate and try every possible trick to keep the levels of employee motivation high. Well, cultivating continuous and exemplary motivation in the workplace can be as simple as training your employees for EQ.
Intrinsic motivation is an essential dimension of emotional intelligence.
With the sense of empowered self-awareness that comes along with emotional intelligence, employees will be able to steer greater motivation. They will have a clear idea of what they are capable of and hence their self-belief would not tremble in demanding situations.
Employees who have high EQ can work out ways to keep the motivation levels of the entire workforce high and make everyone believe in their own abilities. Such high levels of motivation and morale in your teams can be a great competitive advantage for the company.
Wouldn’t any entrepreneur put everything at stake to keep driving such high levels of motivation in the workplace? Think about it: high levels of motivation translate into greater profitability, revenue generation, and business growth!
Better management of emotions implies better stress management and fewer instances of burnout. It’s quite understandable that if your business has to be on the top of its game, your employees need to be on top of their productivity and cognitive ability. However, that is not the case with most organisations, as many employees find themselves reeling under constant stress.
According to Gallup, more than 50% of workers across the globe face overwhelming stress each day.
When these employees are not able to manage their stress, they begin to disengage from work and become prone to burnout. Gallup also concludes that higher levels of disengagement among employees can pull down the profitability of a business by 15 percent.
But, you can change the entire scenario for your organisation by training your employees for high EQ. With EQ, employees will be able to control their negative emotions better, handle persistent stress well, and hence stay engaged in their work even when faced with challenging situations and projects. In fact, they will also support each other in stress management, and the overall vibe of the workplace will remain eased.
With EQ, employees will have the best possible chance to keep their mental health in check.
EQ will enable co-workers to address workplace mental health issues. As long as employees feel well and not subdued, they will maintain a positive outlook and continue to perform well.
Increased EQ will add dynamic value to your business through the optimism of individuals and overall positivity in the workplace. In a workplace with healthy stress levels, where employees share amicable bonds and motivation is maintained, can there ever be a dearth of optimism? Such a vibrant workplace will always respond to crises with positive solutions.
The great trust and reliability that people will have in each other will keep employees going. In fact, seeing positivity all around and great commitment in your employees, even you will feel far more able to face difficult challenges in your business.
In the business world, challenges will keep coming and if you respond with optimism, problems will seem much simpler and easier to tackle. Having said that, emotional intelligence can produce some pretty cool stories of success for small businesses with big aspirations.
Therefore, in a workplace that endorses high EQ, you and your team can spread more positivity and determination. Even if one employee exhibits inspiring optimism in unprecedented times, the ripple effect will be felt among all of your co-workers.
This is how great teams make great things happen!
Emotional intelligence is not limited to assisting workplace relationships and strong connections between colleagues. EQ can also play a major role in delivering excellent customer and client experiences. People who have exemplary emotional intelligence exhibit great social skills. Having said that, employees with high EQ can extend excellent courtesy, understanding, and respect to customers, solving their problems much more efficiently. Well, that’s all customers need to stay loyal to a brand or business.
EQ plays a major role in delivering excellent customer and client experiences.
Strong social skills would ensure that your employees interact with customers with sophistication. They will be able to deliver the kind of experiences clients and customers look forward to. Moreover, the element of empathy will enable your employees to better understand the emotions and frustrations your clients' experience, and provide valuable insights for the improvement of your product and/or service.
In contemporary times, customer loyalty is won better by offering value as opposed to superlative products or transparent pricing.
The bottom line is that EQ gives your business a better chance to retain its most valuable customers and clients. You, as an entrepreneur, already know how important client retention is to keep the business growing 😉
As we saw above, emotional intelligence in itself is a broad skill set inclusive of some pivotal secondary skills. By training your employees for EQ and promoting EQ in the workplace, you can bridge the skill gaps within your organisation.
People with high EQ exhibit quintessential skills like critical thinking, conflict resolution, effective communication, collaboration, etc.
They are able to refine their thoughts to minimise the influence of emotions and intuition. Hence, with EQ, your employees can become far better decision-makers.
With so many skills in your employees’ professional outlook, you can well imagine the kind of value they can add to the company and its objectives. High emotional intelligence can lead to the development of versatile and vital behaviors and attitudes in your employees.
Based on these qualities, your employees will be able to drive overwhelming positive changes in the organisation. Isn’t this something you have always wanted as an employer? See how your employees lead massive transitions in the company’s future when you lead them to EQ!
Employees with high EQ can be far better decision-makers.
To end off, cultivating EQ in the workplace can be a game-changing business strategy especially for startups aiming big. There’s nothing more powerful at work than employees can steer their emotions in a positive direction to produce beneficial outcomes.
Any employer would feel empowered and accomplished to have a workforce that can manifest such abilities. Moreover, besides better management of negative emotions, EQ also facilitates multidimensional skill-building. This is exactly what makes EQ so desirable in the contemporary workplace!
It gives you the perfect opportunity to create a more versatile, resilient, and productive workforce.
An ardent writer, Jessica Robinson works for The Speaking Polymath. She uses this platform to weave her magical words into powerful strands of content and share them with her readers. It is with her power of influential writing that she has been captivating the hearts of multifarious readers for over a decade. Reach her on her blog or on LinkedIN.
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