How to Increase Employee Awareness

1) What is Employee Awareness and why it is important:

Any kind of obscurity or uncertainty in life, work or business may drive people to feel depressed, demoralized, and after all demotivated to perform properly. We all need to stay in touch with what we are working at and why we do this, while any opacity in these questions makes us think that we are distrusted or depreciated by our management, repelled from decision-making or mismanaged, hence we may feel ourselves less proactive and less interested. All these negative associations will impact badly our productivity and performance, so it is an employer’s interest to keep proper level of employee awareness.

Employee Awareness is comprised of many elements. Sense of employee awareness is to increase a level of knowledge among the staff about the main factors concerning their activities, so everyone can feel a satisfactory level of informative support from the organization. There are the following elements of employee awareness, which all together make an employee and organization stronger:

• Awareness on business threats, risks, security and safety requirements;
• Awareness on organizational policies, performance standards and business ethics;
• Awareness on proficiency and service levels required from employees;
• Awareness on business, organizational and working plans;
• Awareness on involvement into projects and contribution to progress/results;
• Awareness on employee contribution added to success of organization;

2) What aspects and means the Employee Awareness is based upon?

Making employees constantly aware of their current statuses, value they make for the organization, contribution they add to the overall corporate success, their professional future, expectations set upon them, and other matters, can be an intricate task as all these things should be integrated within one effective policy. Let’s consider some of key components forming up such a policy:

• Involvement: employees really need to be involved into the processes of decision-making, work planning, and other things which influence their working activities immediately. The better they are involved into workflow of their organization or units, the better they feel their responsibility and ownership upon results of their work.
• Surveys: all people like when they are proposed to express & explain their opinions. Surveying your employees on specific organizational or business questions is a way to better your business performance and demonstrate to your employees that you really listen to their voice, so they can stay aware that their opinions are valued.
• Updates: it is necessary to make employee awareness on-going. Everyone needs to be in touch with the recent business news, updates upon important events, progress upon projects, and other corporate achievements.  
• Feedbacks: employees need to keep abreast of actions that their organization performs to better their working environment, facilitate their tasks, and realize their practical suggestions collected via surveys. When employees are provided with a feedback on what was actually done to satisfy their needs this awareness makes them feel more satisfied with their employment conditions.
• Sole Informational Environment: when people are operating within a single environment with a common set of rules, they are given access to the same information, and updates are delivered to the team members much faster. Using electronic tools to establish such a shared environment will help people to virtually share their documents and tasks within the same domain.

 3) A way to achieve a state of good Employee Awareness:

1. Create a list of categories where you would like to get a sufficient level of employee awareness, for example:
   • IT and business security;
   • Performance standards and requirements;
   • Corporate policies;
   • Working plans and progress;
2. Set a measure to which they exactly need to be aware of these matters;
3. Identify how they can achieve these levels of knowledge, for example:
   • Trainings and awareness programs;
   • Regular face-to-face meetings and discussions;
   • Regular newsletters or other communications;
   • Learning corporate documents;
   • Self-education;
4. Define a technique to control their level of awareness upon the critical matters to prove whether they possess satisfactory degree of knowledge:
   • Tests and examinations;
   • Certifications;
   • Performance tracking;
   • Surveys and self-appraisal;
5. Implement IT-systems for increasing the level of employee awareness:
   • Project Management groupware for sharing the tasks, schedules, tracking performance and monitoring progress over the projects. With a help of this type of software you can increase employee awareness on their working plans and involvement into projects;
   • Document Management systems for sharing files & documents. Using this type of software will help people to access and study the same editions of corporate regulations, policies and other normative documents important to their service;
   • Instant office messengers to let employees increasing level of their awareness by exchanging instant messages;
   • Send frequent corporate newsletters informing employees about the recent events, business plans and other achievements;
6. Constantly increase degree of employee involvement into shared processes of ongoing decision-making, quality management and work planning;
7. Periodically propose the employees to take part in different on-the-job surveys enabling them to express their opinions and points of view on different business topics, so you can make proper administrative conclusions;

4) A simple way to increase Employee Awareness with VIP Task Manager:

VIP Task Manager is a client-server product that stands for collaboration between people, so it enables the managers to increase awareness of their staff in terms of particular tasks and projects. Let’s consider simple step-by-step instructions to make the employees aware of tasks, workflow and corporate interactions, using this product:

 Actions (Task Tree and Task List modes):

1. Plan a project – create a hierarchy of task groups populated with tasks;
2. Subscribe employees in Resource List to get Notifications on task changes – maintain their level of awareness on progress and recent changes in the database;
3. Assign right people to right tasks. Make them aware of details by filling parameters of the tasks and inputting notes;
4. Set Permissions to make sure that employees can see and operate their tasks;
5. Assign Supervisors to tasks (select appropriate resources in Watch List of tasks) to let them be automatically informed about any changes applied to tasks;
6. Attach organizational documents to tasks and let the users share them (open and modify them as a link, or read-only as an uploaded file);

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