The Right Level of Challenge for Your Staff

It’s common to hear about the merits of being challenged in the workplace. However, it’s something that everyone might immediately recognize as a delicate balancing act. As an employer, you don’t want to tip the scales too far and create an enormously stressful environment that can limit employee productivity and engagement. However, the answer might be understanding that a challenge doesn’t always equate to burdening your employees with an unreasonable workload or overly complicated task.

Defining the right level of challenge and subsequently implementing it in your business can improve working conditions for your employees, lead you to a more productive workforce and increase incentives for prospective employees to apply.

Keeping Engagement High

If employees don’t feel as though they have much to do on a given day of work, it’s natural that they might start to zone out or dissociate from work. It could be that the work is too easy, or what they have to do is easy to complete before the work day is done. That’s not always negative – in the area of freelance work, it might be beneficial that some people feel they can control their workflow.However, people like to be pushed, and they like to feel that their work is worthwhile. This can mean the satisfaction of completing a challenging but impactful project is worth it. It can be the opportunity to develop their own professional skills through industry-standard tools like a Kubernetes migration.

Keep Stress Levels Low

The impulse to provide your employees with challenging work could lead to a situation where you’re throwing endless tasks at them to keep them busy or providing them with more responsibilities than their role entails. This might have the negative impact of exhausting them, leading them to become increasingly stressed and experiencing burnout. This can have a direct impact on how productive they are, and it might even damage their mental health to the point where they consider working elsewhere.

Balancing out the challenge of their work with a supportive work environment that gives them breaks whenever they need it can help remove the stress from the situation. You’re trying to curate a situation where they want to overcome the challenge, after all, rather than just walk away from it.

Challenge Aided by Support

The idea of giving your employees a challenge isn’t so that they have to struggle all by themselves. Ultimately, you still want to encourage collaboration and teamwork, even if every member of your staff has their own responsibilities. If someone is struggling with their work, they should feel as though they can talk it through with you or their co-workers and get to a point where multiple heads are trying to crack it together. The result is positive for your business either way, so taking the route that leads to a greater sense of individual comfort might be better for you in the long run.

This also means that people sometimes need a break from work in general, and being flexible can also create a sense of give-and-take that works in your favor.