Your Employee’s Psychological Needs- What it Means for Your Hiring Process

At the most basic level, every practice is made up of people who come to work each with their own physical and psychological needs. Ignoring these needs leads to an unmotivated and unengaged work force but making efforts to meet these needs in the workplace gives you the best chance to get the best work out of your people.

 

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, human beings have five major needs:

 

• Physiological Needs - This includes the most basic human needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter. Many of your employees are working for you to meet these needs. People who are struggling to make ends meet can’t be expected to do the kind of creative and strategic work it takes to run a successful business.

 

• Safety - This includes physical safety. Employees need to know there are safety guidelines and procedures that are in place in case anything goes wrong. But safety also includes job security. Your staff won’t perform at their best in an environment where they feel like one wrong word or move might get them fired. Employees are more likely to remain loyal to an organization where they can feel secure.

 

• Love and Belonging – These needs are present in a nonromantic sense in the workplace. It is worthwhile to create a work environment where employees feel like a valued member of the team. If you can create a work environment where everyone feels a genuine connection, your results will be much greater than if your practice operated as a group of isolated individuals.

 

• Esteem – There are two factors when it comes to esteem: self-esteem and esteem from others. In the workplace, it’s easier to give people esteem externally by recognizing their efforts, offering them respect, and even giving them the chance to advance in the company. Self-esteem comes from a sense of competence and mastery, so the best way to improve it at work is to challenge your employees to go beyond what they thought they could accomplish.

 

• Self-Actualization - Once people have their other needs met, they naturally want to realize their full potential. Not everyone finds their full self-actualization in the workplace, but for those who do, you’ll want to figure out how to hold onto those people by helping them meet all their needs to give your practice a competitive advantage that’s hard to beat.

 

How Can Understanding Psychological Needs Help Your Bottom Line?

 

Understanding your employees’ psychological needs lets you know how to create an environment that motivates them to do their best work. Beyond that, employees who are not having their psychological needs met in your organization will eventually move on to another place that better meets their needs. This means higher turnover for you, which brings higher costs for hiring, recruiting, and training.

 

This is where bringing in an expert in recruiting works to your advantage, by filtering out the candidates who won’t have their needs met with your organization and maximizing the hires who will thrive with you. Allow me the opportunity to explain how my team has earned an 88 percent success rate in presenting quality candidates to our clients in the first 90 days of the recruitment process. I look forward to our conversation.