4 Ways for Making Your Teams Feel Valued

January 3, 2023

shaking hands

Overview: By making their teams feel valued, leaders can boost job satisfaction, employee retention, company morale, and brand image. To boost employee satisfaction, leaders should focus on providing meaningful work, offering fair compensation, and promoting work-life balance. Employees also appreciate development and in-house advancement opportunities.


Employee empowerment is the cornerstone of employee satisfaction, talent retention, and sustainable organizational success. It’s inextricably interwoven with employee appreciation. How can leaders make their teams feel valued? What can they do to make their employees feel appreciated? How do organizations benefit from employees who feel appreciated?

By making employees feel appreciated, leaders build meaningful connections with them. They invite their employees to feel they’re contributing members of a community built around a set of worthy values. Through employee appreciation, leaders:

  • Build trust and foster engagement. Employees who know their organizations value their input are more likely to step forward and take initiative. They grow to trust leadership and shed their reservations about contributing.
  • Reduce employee turnover. Leadership coaching understands leaders must focus on reducing employee turnover to bring up the next generation of leaders in-house. Employees who feel valued are less likely to look for greener pastures elsewhere. Employee satisfaction draws outside talent to the organization instead.
  • Improve morale. People who like their work environment are more productive. Those who see themselves as valuable contributors tend to enjoy their work. As soon as people gain psychological ownership of what they do, it ceases to be a chore and becomes a pet project.
  • Boost company brand. Employee satisfaction often takes vocal shape. Employees who like their work talk about it to their friends, families, and acquaintances. They spread the word about what a great place their organizations are.  

From the perspective of leadership coaching, there’s plenty leaders can do to boost the satisfaction of their teams.

1. Providing Meaningful Work

Knowing their work matters allows employees to take pleasure in doing it. Meaningful work has a different meaning to each employee. These meanings are based on individual preferences and career ambitions, but their effects are the same.

Getting to know employees is essential for leaders. If they know someone who aspires to ascend to a managerial position, they can give an employee a project lead. Allowing employees to understand what every organizational department does and how their work fits in is another way to establish valued reports.

2. Promoting Work-Life Balance

Leadership burnout is the nemesis of leaders everywhere. It can turn effective, enthusiastic leaders into lethargic, depressed versions of themselves. Leadership coaching can help you prevent and deal with burnout. Few organizations can afford executive coaching for employees, however.

Leaders, however, can help the principles of leadership coaching trickle down the organizational ranks. They can ensure employees benefit from programs that prevent burnout. They can achieve this by:

  • Making work hours flexible
  • Allowing people to work remotely
  • Being reasonable about off-hours communication
  • Actively developing employees’ time-management skills
  • Featuring wellness days
  • Offering paid time off

3. Providing Fair Compensation

Financial levers should never be your go-to option for employee motivation. That said, to feel appreciated, employees like to receive fair remuneration. It’s up to you and your fellow decision-makers to determine what constitutes fair compensation, but employees must consider your offer as fair or even generous.

Employee compensation comprises many elements. Leaders have several options to win over their employees’ practicality-focused fancy:

  • Fair base salaries
  • Performance-based extra pay
  • Paid time off
  • Reasonable retirement contributions
  • Reimbursement of transportation expenses
  • Bonuses and incentives
Removing paper money from a wallet.
Fair pay can be motivating.

4. Creating Development and Learning Opportunities

One of the best ways leaders can show teams they value them is by investing in their development. Creating development opportunities for employees is not equivalent to an extensive executive coaching program. Instead, organizations can pay for professional development courses or reimburse the cost of tuition on programs that employees attend.

Departmental cross-training is a cost-effective approach to diversifying the skills of the workforce. This approach can also defeat organizational silos.

Showing appreciation to employees and contributors on every organizational level creates strong company cultures. Business coaching sees strong company cultures as essential for sustainable success.

Contact us to learn more about how you can join the IL Movement as a coach or how you can benefit from partnering with us to bring IL Solutions to you and your organization.


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