The Emotional Intelligent Courses For Employee Encouragement

What is the first thing, that comes up in your mind, when you think of Google as a company? Google has established its awesome reputation and ranked number 5 on Glassdoor’s best places to work ranking in 2018. Among ample employees’ benefits provided by Google, there is an increasing trend of Google employees participating in emotional intelligence training programs each year so that they can succeed in building a strong relationship with others including their colleagues. This culture started in 2006, when Chade-Meng Tan, a Google engineer at that time decided to create a program, which can train people to be more aware of their emotions and teach them the skills to better deal with their emotions. While this becomes more popular among Google employees due to the positive reviews, it may distract from the issue that other reasons are exacerbating some concerns they have at work.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is defined as the ability to identify and manage one’s and others’ emotions. An American psychologist, Daniel Goleman, divided emotional intelligence into five components. The first one is self-awareness. The higher emotional intelligence you have, the higher sense of self-awareness you have, which means you know how you feel and what your strengths and weakness are. Therefore, an employee, who has high EI, knows which department or position he or she should work for to have the best job performance. The second one is self-regulation. If you have high EI, you probably will not get angry or upset easily because you can control your emotions well. This means negative feelings can hardly affect an emotional intelligent employee, preventing he or her from making impulsive decisions. This leads to better problem solving due to calmness. The third one is motivation. Emotional intelligent workers tend to have more positive attitudes towards their jobs, so they are emotionally active. They can even influence their colleagues and maintain an aspiring working atmosphere. As they are motivated, they work more efficiently. The fourth one is empathy. Employees, who have high EI, are more empathetic, so they can perceive others’ emotions accurately. This is essential especially when working as a team, since teammates may feel frustrated facing obstacles and need our support. Therefore, if our co-workers think their needs are understood, they will become more loyal to their employers; thus, we can maintain the morale high. The last one is social skills. Emotional intelligent employees have better communication skills, such as having an open mind to accept diverse opinions and appreciating their co-worker. These can strengthen the bond between employees so that there are fewer conflicts in the workplace. These five components are all considered in emotional intelligence training programs.

Among all the emotional intelligence training programs available, I will focus on the program provided by Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which is founded by Chade-Meng Tan in 2012, and it is the most popular program chosen by Google employees. There are a lot of positive feedbacks given by the participants, showing that the program really helps them in applying their increased emotional intelligence skills to their daily life. As Google lets about 1500 of its employees to participate in the emotional intelligence training programs each year, most of them should have no problems coping with both interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships and feel comfortable working in Google. However, Google employees are ranked fourth on the least loyal employees among 500 U. S. companies in an analysis done by PayScale in 2013. Google’s workers’ median tenure is only 1. 1 year. This shows there are other reasons for the employees to quit Google, and they cannot be solved by simply improving their emotional intelligence. All the online stories shared by former Google employees shows that they never regret from quitting Google. Most of them felt fantastic about their jobs at first, but they realized that they were unhappy working at their positions. I found out most of them quit Google because they did not find their value anymore.

Google is a huge fast-growing company with more than 85 thousand employees, who graduated from top colleges around the globe. Therefore, the competition is extremely intense, and there are too many over-qualified employees, so the chance of getting a promotion is little. They started to feel depressed because they thought they could not make a difference in Google. Work was specialized, so they had to do the same thing every day, while some were tired of spending more and more time in Google, since they were used to the perks provided by Google, such as free food and gyms. They were bored with having the same routine every day. Also, they lost their freedom to enjoy their own lives. In the perspective of Google employees, the awesome perks, which are provided by Googles, can actually be one of the reasons for quitting Google. The problems have formed a vicious cycle because Google is recruiting more talented employees every year but also losing a certain amount of current employees. This may not be very harmful to Google in short-term, as there are numerous applications for jobs in Google each year anyway.

Nevertheless, the continuous loss of employees can affect the morale of the remaining employees, hurting the productivity and the reputation of the company. Moreover, this is what all small and medium-sized companies should understand avoiding losing good employees because it is costly for them to replace workers.