Should Organizations Start To Leverage Employee Strengths?

Any individual who makes use of all his professional skills and strengths every single day is more likely to be made responsible for a certain type of job. The job will have to require his or her type of skill and attention. Several human behavior studies and research works have proven this fact. Researchers are of the opinion that there is a strong connection between employee engagement and the strengths of an employee. This strong connection holds the key for the company to enhance its performance in the best possible way.

Why employee strength is important

Employees enhance their skill and strength by identifying how they feel, behave and think every day. They try to work on and enhance their natural talents. They use these talents as a foundation for enhancing their strength and ability to perform in a near perfect manner at their work place. Many firms around the world hire experts to enhance and leverage employee strengths. Such leverage helps the company to achieve a desired level of success.

These experts conduct annual studies to find out the level of effort required to enhance the strengths of the employees. This is considered to be a much better way to improve company performance. The company should always try to concentrate the strength of their employees and not their weaknesses. Employees need to identify their own skills and strengths. Only then will they be able to provide satisfactory work performance. Not only that, they will also choose to stay with the company for an extended period.

A recent study conducted showed how employees tend to use their strengths at the workplace. A phenomenon called the Strengths Orientation Index came into existence. This is used to measure the relation between employee engagement and employee strength. This index has helped several companies to understand how they can improve the working environment for their employees. Only with a satisfactory working environment can a company expect to leverage its employees’ strengths. The index includes the following items:

• Setting goals based on employee strength

• Identifying strengths of people around you

• Discussing ways to improve strength with supervisors

• Understanding the company’s desire to help employees build their strength

This index was tested again statistical data from various parts of the world. The conclusion was that 3% of the total employees under scrutiny agreed with the fourth factor on the index. This is bad news for the corporate world. This shows that not all companies try to help their employees in making full use of their strengths. This actually might prove to be a costly mistake, in financial and in HR management terms. Employees react and respond in a much more efficient manner if they feel that their company is helping them to build their strength. Proper help and encouragement is appreciated by any employee of any company. They use this to give rise to higher levels of enthusiasm while they work at the office. So, some changes must be made to improve this response percentage.

Companies can use efficient managers to help employees maximise their strengths and diminish their weaknesses. It is up to the managers to ignore the weaknesses of the employees and try to leverage their strengths. They need to do this so as to ensure that the business performance stays at a satisfactory level.

A manager must remember one simple thing – all employees have strengths of different types. A company is basically a mixture of all these strengths and talents. Only by proper leverage and utilisation can the company maintain an efficient work environment. For this, employers need to give their employees a fair amount of chance to perform so as to reach the epitome of business success.