Respect is not just something employees can be enforced to give employers. It’s an appreciated asset for employers to demonstrate and receive in the workplace. Earning employee respect is not every time an easy task, but when employers discover ways to earn respect at workplace, productive benefits result. Now how to earn employee respect at your workstations?

As Bruce J. Avolio, Ph.D. inscribed, (executive director at the Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business), some tips for employers/managers to receive respect from employees includes:

Be reliable:

• Be a reliable image of your organization’s espoused morals and codes while implementing transparency and justice.

Promote leadership:

• Make all workers feel like ‘owners’ in competition with ‘renters’ that their opinion matters, and that people in stations of power pay attention to hear and engage with their employees.

Advance potential:

•  Support each worker to feel like they are realization their full potential and accomplishing their performance goals by participating in development.

Craft an energized environment:

•  Build a positive environment where your followers’ energy is focused in the direction of growth and success against competitors versus defensive against internal enemies from what you’re planning to accomplish.

Sacrifice when needed:

• Be prepared to sacrifice for the bigger good of the organization when such sacrifices consists on to everyone’s victory.

As President Bill Mixon, of Universal Hospital Services, Inc., described the key to earning employee admiration is to empower employees and idealize the leadership behavior you want by considering employees with dignity and respect. “If employees respect a person as a leader, they are more likely to place those same leadership potentials into exercise. Empowering employees to take decisions also forms trust. When you display employees you trust their knowledge and skills, you permits them to make keen decisions that boost up the company.”

Mounting employee potential is also essential. Notes Mixon, “When employees’ sense valued and prized, they take durable ownership of their work and pursue new opportunities to improve and develop in their roles. This not only help the employee to grow and expand, but also the company and its clients.”

Retired president Howard Behar, of Starbucks Coffee Company, used this similar approach of showing employees that they are praised to help establish the Starbucks company, which stresses the significance of people over profits. For example, Starbucks assures that there were no significant perks for seniors. “All subordinates are called ‘partners’ and there is no separation in any mode of partners and the management team. Outside of pay and stock, each partner receives the same, even the same healthcare coverage. We did this because it was the correct and reasonable thing to do, not because we assumed it would help us earn respect,” Behar enlightened.

In addition, the Starbucks management team schedule ‘open forum’ conferences where any partner could speak anything, can raise any question and they would address it. “It was open dialogue, and I mean truly open dialogue through these conferences. If they desired to debate what I was paid as the president of the company then they could,” said Behar. “No subject was off-limits.”

The management team also mentioned a feedback paper in every partner’s paycheck requesting for remarks on whatsoever that seemed in contradiction to the company’s values and morals – with Behar reading every feedback card submitted. If an employee doesn’t live up to the values and morals of the company, the organization would eliminate that individual. Behar further informed, “You could get fired a lot quicker for not living the values than not accomplishing the financial numbers.”

Bottom Line:

If you are an employer or manager, looking to get the respect of your employees? Then emphasis on relationships and trust. The ground for earning respect is developing firm relationships with subordinates by building trust within the organization. Behar describe this as, “If workers are feeling trust, they will show more productive, are more eager to take risks, be resourceful, and provide solutions for difficult problems. It does not mean problems won’t arise, but it means you can endure just about anything because you can talk things through.”