How To Improve Employee Emotional Intelligence (EI)?

Are you well-linked with your colleagues at work? Do you often find yourself calm and composed in a hasty situation? If your answers to these questions were yes, rest assured that you are emotionally intelligent. But how do you integrate emotional intelligence in the workplace?

Emotional intelligence is a skill of maintaining a balance between consciousness about self as well your environment. Primarily, it is the ability to control and evaluate your emotions and that of others.

Achieving the state of emotional intelligence (EI) can help you create stability in your personal and professional life, to achieve work-life balance. Moreover, if all your employees practice this quality, you can notice a significant improvement in their productivity and, consequently, in revenue.

You may be wondering how emotional intelligence at work helps pull-off all this. Let us first understand more about this vast array of competencies, grouped under 4 major categories given below.

Components of Emotional Intelligence

• Self-Awareness: The primary component of EI is understanding your emotions. It is the ability to be aware of your conscience - identifying your feelings, needs, and desires.
• Self-Management: Being aware of what you want is not enough. You must be able to control it to succeed in life. Self-management refers to regulating your feelings such that you can find solutions to problems and use them for growth.
• Social Awareness: It is the notion of acknowledging others’ interests and events taking place around you. You must empathize with others, providing encouragement and support.
• Relationship Management: This is an interpersonal skill that includes motivating others, practicing teamwork, managing disputes, encouraging employee innovation, and finding solutions.

Benefits of EI At Work

Incorporating emotional intelligence in the workplace helps your employees and organization on the whole in countless ways. Here are a few of the multiple benefits of EI at work.

Positive Work Ambiance

A workplace with emotionally intelligent employees will automatically create a cheerful work ambiance. It will embark a supportive work culture of mutual respect, friendliness, and in turn, create a fun workstation. Your staff will enjoy working and the company of their colleagues.

Team Work

One of the prime benefits of working with emotional intelligence is that your team will work cohesively. They will share ideas, support each other, and communicate better. This work approach will also motivate remote teams, providing improved results.

Job Satisfaction

Emotional intelligence helps your employees work with a positive attitude. They can control their emotions better and find growth opportunities in everything they do. Resultantly, your staff is sure to gain a higher job satisfaction that further improves their productivity and increases revenue.

Compassion and Empathy

Remote workers with emotional intelligence are likely to gain maximum benefit. It will be a work environment where colleagues will understand each other’s situation and try to provide support wherever possible. Resultantly, even remote employees will feel connected to the company, with minimum communication gaps.

EI has multiple other benefits for you and your organization. These include but are not limited to reducing stress, higher self-control, embracing change, time pressure management, executive leadership, and more.

Limitations of Working with Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence has countless benefits for your employees' professional and personal growth. Moreover, it is highly essential for your firm's progress. However, too much of this quality can, in fact, turn into a weakness. Here is how excessive emotional intelligence in the workplace can hamper development.

• A lower degree of creativity and free-spiritedness to bring about change.
• Difficulty in criticizing or providing negative feedback to employees.
• May often lead to manipulating others.
• Staying away from bold choices that require taking risks.

Overall, this explains 'the higher, the better is not always true, and it sure does not apply to emotional intelligence. Though individuals with a very high EI may excel at work, they are not likely to be proficient leaders and change-makers.

Examples of High and Low EI At Work

So what is it like to work with emotional intelligence? Let's take some examples of individuals with a high and low EI at work.

Here is how your employee working with emotional intelligence will react to situations:

• Being calm and displaying a problem-solving attitude in times of challenging scenarios.
• Give unpleasant work reviews to others when necessary for correction and growth.
• Take bold, uncertain steps to bring change in the organization and display creativity.

On the other hand, individuals with low EI may react differently in the same situations.

• Focusing on the downsides and panicking in tough times.
• Refrain from giving negative feedback at all costs to prevent ruining employee relationships.
• Always adhering to well-defined norms and fearing change.

How To Measure Employee EI

If you want to measure the emotional intelligence quotient in your employees, there are several metrics you can follow. Create an assessment form containing questions that help identify the following aspects:

• Recognizing self-emotions
• Controlling self-emotions
• Recognizing others’ emotions
• Controlling others’ emotions
• Practicing empathy
• Innovative thinking
• Motivating and encouraging others
• Problem-solving qualities
• Awareness of organizational activities
• Embracing change

Ways To Improve EI At Work

Whether or not your employees scored well in the EI test, you can improve emotional intelligence in the workplace. Here are a few methods.

EI Training

One of the best ways of spreading awareness about the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace is through training. You can organize workshops and encourage your employees to take up EI courses to learn and implement these qualities.

Encourage

You must consistently advise your team to practice empathy and compassion towards the other employees. For example, you can get a double height adjustable standing desk for your team to promote teamwork, communication, and coordination.

Constant Motivation

Every individual needs to find a source of motivation to give in their best. Therefore, you must constantly motivate your team through appreciation and incentives. For example, you can give an ergonomic office chair to your remote workers to express your support and care.

Wrap Up

Practicing emotional intelligence in the workplace is not challenging if your entire team works towards achieving it. You must spread awareness about EI and practice these qualities yourself to set an example for your crew.

On successfully integrating emotional intelligence in your work culture, you will automatically notice a northward drift in productivity and output!