The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
Many organizations take a fact-based approach to gain a better understanding of what employees need, but what often gets overlooked are the thoughts and feelings your people are experiencing, which can impact employee effectiveness at work. Because there’s a natural need in all of us to feel like we belong and are appreciated, executives must be intentional with their approach to understanding the people working for them. Emotional intelligence in the workplace, also known as workplace EQ, is critical to the success of any people-driven organization. And it starts with leadership.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Workplace EQ involves the perception, management, self-awareness and communication skills necessary to help team members overcome significant challenges; inevitably leading to successful business operations. Emotional intelligence in the workplace is one of the most critical leadership skills, as it helps workers understand and manage their own emotions around other coworkers.
The workplace can be chaotic at times; filled with high demands, heavy workloads, impossible deadlines and a calendar full of meetings. It can also be a rewarding place, offering team-building exercises, career advancement training, benefits, job incentives and more. All of these facets play a role in how someone feels at any given moment. How people manage these feelings indicates their level of emotional intelligence.
Using HR Technology for the Wellbeing of Your Organization
A new study conducted by UKG shows that managers impact their employees’ mental health more than even their doctors or therapists. A whopping 69 percent of employees surveyed indicated that leadership impacted their mental health. The role of emotion takes a strong toll on employee productivity, satisfaction and overall wellbeing.
As a business leader, you can use the powers of workplace EQ for good (and help take the load off your human resources HR department). In order for leaders to fully connect people processes with organizational goals and initiatives, there must be a balance between facts and feelings (which is not always easy to find). However, HR technology can help you as a leader to get a clearer picture of what’s happening with your people, how it affects company goals and what you can do about it.
Here are a few practical ways to help you get the executive-level insights you need to lead with empathy:
1. People-driven Data Insights
As a business leader, it’s important to have information served up in easy-to-understand formats like dashboards that align people-driven data with executive priorities. This allows you to gain greater control of the business and a greater understanding of the needs of your people. Such insights need to be instant and provide at-a-glance answers so you can better evaluate the overall health of the organization, control people-costs and make educated decisions. Having access to real-time data can help you view data through the right lens, so you can manage your people and operating budgets better, smarter and faster.
For example, one way data can help you boost workplace EQ is by quickly identifying and recognizing employees who are top performers so you can reward them accordingly. This works the other way too, as access to real-time, day-to-day insights allows you to stay ahead of performance issues so you can take action before the situation (or the employee) becomes a problem.
2. AI and Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
Another way to consider the needs of your employees is by putting all of your people-driven data in one place and leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to give your organization a boost. AI technology can notify you and inform you of trends that are happening well before you can compile the data. AI and EQ all wrapped up in one supercharged bundle? Pretty mind-blowing stuff, right?
When you have technology that displays benchmarks about your business and your people, keeps an eye on what normal looks like for your organization and highlights any outliers, you’re better able to get ahead of potential issues. This allows you to focus faster on areas of success, as well as areas needing improvement.
3. Unbiased Software
You can’t bring balance to the workplace without first checking your own emotions. Remember earlier, when it was mentioned that workplace EQ starts with executive leadership? Yeah, that’s you.
Personal competencies equip an individual with the skills to manage one’s self. These skills include self-awareness, self-regulation and self-motivation. Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence. Identifying one’s strengths, weaknesses, emotions and intuitions gives a sense of clarity and ensures good decision-making.
In order to manage others, you must first be able to manage yourself. And there’s no harm in using human capital management (HCM) technology to help you avoid personal bias. Another distinct advantage to artificial intelligence is sentiment analysis. This is crucial when determining the level of emotional intelligence in the workplace and the motivation behind your and your employees’ responses to key activities.
Sentiment analysis will help you gain an understanding of attitudes, opinions and emotions in a fact-based way. Looking at a variety of activities, such as how your hiring teams are evaluating candidates, employee survey results and manager comments in performance reviews, AI’s unbiased approach can evaluate the emotions behind those responses and improve the emotional health of all involved.
Don’t Let Things Turn Ugly
At Quanta, we believe that nothing is more important than optimizing employee satisfaction, engagement and effectiveness in the workplace. With our HCM platform’s talent management capabilities and real-time data reporting, we can help strengthen workplace EQ for your organization. Contact us today or book a 5-minute fit call to automate your HR needs so that you can focus on employee satisfaction and culture.
