L. Duksaitė: How important are the emotional needs of an employee for a manager?

Frustration at the manager’s tendency to micromanage. Anger at being mistreated at work. Despair that I am not accepted by my colleagues and feel excluded. Boredom at having to do day in, day out, what others can easily do, while no-one is using my skills. What is common between all these sentences?

Emotional needs. McKinsey has an interesting article on them. Often, emotional needs are overlooked when talking about different motivational systems.

And every worker, without exception, has them.

For some it may be important to feel needed, for others to be able to make their own decisions, and for others to feel that the work is interesting, dynamic and that they learn something new every day.

Moreover, they are not directly linked to cash expenditure. However, employees who feel emotionally well perform better and generate better results. A common need when it comes to work – whether as a manager or a worker:

– do meaningful work

– being part of a team with good relations.

And that’s just as important as getting a good income.

What about Maslow’s famous pyramid?

It is both right and wrong at the same time: basic needs do not come before emotional needs. Indeed, even if basic needs cannot be fully met, wellbeing can be improved by better meeting at least emotional needs. They exist in parallel.

Three important human (and therefore employee) needs:

☑️ competences

☑️ autonomies

☑️ connection.

From the McKinsey study, it seems that employers tend to take care of these needs when employees have higher qualifications or positions. While others are not given much attention. Paradoxically, this exacerbates social exclusion.

The authors of the study highlight a number of ways for employers to better respond to colleagues’ emotional needs:

☑️ Recognising excellence. Discuss work regularly – without blame or judgement, asking what I can do as a manager to make your job easier. Remembering to thank or praise for a job well done.

☑️ Giving autonomy. Look for ways to extend the boundaries of decision-making or responsibility. For example, so that the checkout clerk can decide whether to return an item or compensate a customer.

☑️ Making a connection. Encourage regular informal gatherings, e.g. for coffee or tea, to strictly prevent any mobbing or bullying situations. At the same time, encourage and spot leaders who foster warm communication.

☑️ Making sense. Remember the joke about the NASA cleaner who cleans the visitor’s toilet and, when asked what you are doing there, replies, “What’s that? We’re putting men on the moon.”

Indeed, this is a true story, born out of a real situation, when President Kennedy visited NASA in 1962 and met a janitor in the corridor and asked him about his role in the organisation. The janitor replied ‘I help put a man on the moon’.

It seems like a simple four things, but sometimes they get lost among clever motivational systems and schemes.