As an employer, you want to create a happy, productive, and profitable business environment, and unsurprisingly, the former has been shown to help contribute to the latter. When your workers are content and comfortable working for you, they’ll contribute so much more to the success of your company than they will if they arrive at your office dreading the day ahead.
Yet happiness is an elusive quality, and creating it can be difficult. Difficult, but certainly not impossible. If you’re looking for ways to keep everyone smiling from Monday to Friday, here are a few ideas to help you…
#1: Provide Proper Training
When your employees are not outfitted with the skills that they need to succeed, they can start to feel like they’re floundering. Their stress levels rise, their anxieties soar, and they really start to worry about the work they’re producing. The easiest way to combat this and help them to feel at ease in the workplace is by providing an adequate level of training, and this is pretty easy to do. Start when they start by buddying new employees up with a more experienced member of staff, and continue it with monthly workshops and mentoring schemes to help them further develop their talents. Invest in the people who work for you, and they’ll invest the best of themselves in your business.
#2: Help Them to Bond
Everyone enjoys working with their friends, and although professionalism has its place, it can go hand in hand with having fun. Take the time to organise occasional events, even if it’s just going for lunch as a team once a month. At Christmas, make sure there’s a party and festive decorations, and on birthdays bring cake. The more you can encourage people to talk outside of work, the easier they’ll find it to discover common ground and develop a sense of camaraderie.
#3: Teach Them How to De-stress
Stress is obviously detrimental to happiness, so see if you can find some ways to help your employees unwind. Weekly office yoga classes work for some, whilst making sure that your door is always open works for others. Where you can, try to be flexible about working hours and see if you can accommodate the other demands on your employees’ time, whether this is children, a part-time university course, or looking after an elderly parent. You might even find that it’s as simple as sharing information to help reduce the unpleasantness of commuting, such as this blog post from First Response. Go the extra mile to help, and those who work for you will be all too happy to return the favour.
Follow these three top tips today to make your office a happier and healthier place to be.
