Why employee empowerment and work life balance is so important?
by Robert van Stokrom | Posted in Our People | DFP Recruitment, empowerment, work life balane | Share your comments
In my previous blog I talked about DFP’s commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility and the importance we assign to acting for charity where we can. In this blog, I would like to share with you what DFP does to show our staff through actions that they are very important to us. It’s simple really; DFP needs every individual and their strengths to keep it turning.
At DFP the leadership team continuously consults with staff asking how we can help make their lives within DFP better and more rewarding. Within our coaching frameworks our leaders use a simple tool embedded within the conversation to track and identify the staff member’s key engagement drivers. For example some want to have control over their own working lives, some want to keep their career progress on track, some focus on how to make the workplace a happy one. So we work hard to ensure that we understand the individual needs and seek to reward and recognise the person in a way that is of value and of meaning for them.
A recent survey of our staff came back with an overwhelmingly positive response; many of our staff said they felt empowered by the working environment we provide. What fabulous feedback for a CEO to hear!
DFP is a very family oriented company. Family matters to me personally- greatly, so too of course it matters to all at DFP. They have siblings, parents, partners, children – they want to be home on time for dinner, to attend child school concerts, sporting events etc. We are fair dinkum when we say we offer flexible work practices to our staff and so we make flexible work hours a reality.
We walk the talk not just talk the talk…new people entering our company notice this immediately and are grateful that we fulfill on the promise. Our staff rated us a 9.6 out of 10 on work life balance and for many this is of significant value that they haven’t found any where else.
We truly value all at DFP, and take every opportunity to thank our staff for their commitment. We celebrate staff anniversaries with gifts and announcements, we send the children of DFP staff birthday surprises on their day, we publicly celebrate important milestone events in everyone’s lives. We constantly make it known to everyone in the company that we value an individual’s contribution to their team and to the organisation.
In recent weeks our Chief Operating Officer Kate Coath and I launched a new award, adding to the existing yearly and monthly awards. The Distinction Award will be bi-annual and focuses on the individual staff member’s achievement of any or all of our four corporate objectives. I try to recognize and champion the efforts of my team when they go above and beyond in DFP’s name, and sometimes when they just do their jobs really well.
It is a key measure for me to see that our staff engagement levels are high, and I am proud to say that our staff are motivated, interested and feel they are an essential contributor to the success of DFP.