Did you know that happy employees are more productive? There are many reasons to put a lot of effort into making your employees happier including improving overall efficiency, building self-motivated team and turning them into brand advocates.
Surprisingly, money cannot buy employees’ happiness, so how to bring happiness into your office?
How to Build a Happier Team
Here are three things you can do to help your employees get more done in a day by making them happier.
1. Set up a More Productive, Healthier Working Environment
In America, we sit an average of 7.7 hours per day. This figure is similar in most Western countries, and at their highest in offices. This is also extremely unhealthy, and besides the obesity epidemic, it is causing a number of other health concerns such as debilitating, even fatal diseases.
To keep employees healthy and working effectively, invest into ergonomics office furniture, carefully plan the office design and decor.
Knoll is one of the leading ergonomics furniture advocates providing a lot of tools and resources for properly planning your office furniture.
Open office spaces have been found to be productivity killers again and again. Ideally, you could provide a private office for every employee, but this isn’t possible for many companies. Instead, consider offering multiple spaces where employees can work, outside of their cubicle.
Overhead lights and computer screens are some of the most insidious health concerns facing people who work in offices. Human beings are meant to be exposed to natural light, not synthetic light. A study by Northwestern University even found that natural light in an office environment led to better sleep quality, duration, and other health benefits.
For Remote and Distributed Teams, Give Your Employees a Place to Meet and Collaborate
These days an efficient team doesn’t have to be placed in one office, even in one city. You can unite global team within one team giving them access your company email from home, using document management solutions like Zoho and managing their time using a shared business dashboard like Cyfe.
But you may still want to consider giving your remote employees a place to regularly meet. One of the most cited studies by Nicholas Bloom and graduate student James Liang claims that remote employees working from home outperform the office workers.
But effeciency doesn’t always mean happiness. It’s been found by UN International Labour Organization that working from home may have negative outcome because longer working hours, higher work intensity and work-home interference” may result in insomnia and stress.
Allowing people to work from home hasn’t worked well for many companies including Yahoo and IBM. According to Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer:
“People are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together”
Employees can be fully engaged in offices, and for many companies that can be a key job performance enhancer.
So if the nature of your company’s routine requires a lot of working together and you’ll find your remote team in need of more face-to-face communication, consider setting up a meeting place or remote office space where they can get together on a regular basis. To provide your distributed teams with alternative working environment, try sites like Offices.net allowing to find a comfortable fully set-up working place for your remote employees all over the world:
2. Keep the Employees’ Morale High with Company Outings
The company that plays together, stays together. There are numerous examples showing that field trips, company lunches, and nights-out have had the greatest effect on employee engagement levels.
At Internet Marketing Ninjas we make sure to have at least 1 company trip and multiple company outings a year. This have proved to boost company’s morale and nurture more engaged and loyal employees.
Company outings may very well be combined with productivity too. As an example, Mustard Creative makes sure to get as many important things done at the company field trips as possible. They make plans about the future, define their goals and brainstorm new initiatives allowing all their employees to feel important part of the community.
…we set some time aside to take a good ol’ field trip to reflect, set some goals and make commitments to our customers and each other moving forward.
3. Make Sure Your Employees’ Efforts Are Appreciated
Employees who feel appreciated are more engaged. Each employee beats to a different drum but most employees appear to strive public recognition.
According to a Westminster College study, when asked what leaders could do more of to improve engagement, almost 60% of respondents replied “give recognition”.
A study by online career site Glassdoor revealed that 69% of employees would work harder if they felt their efforts were better appreciated.
And what’s a better way to make your team feel valued at work than to share their efforts with the whole world? Your website and social media accounts are the best places to share your team results.
- Work on your company’s “About” page to list as many employees as you can there.
- Encourage employees to provide the author byline for each article they write on your website
- Share your employees’ stories on your site. For example, Brafton regularly features their new and old employees in the blog spotlights
- Include “featured” employees on your home page
- Regularly thank and recognize employees in your social media streams. Here are a few business WordPress themes that help introduce your company’s human talent to your audience in a fluid, elegant presentation. My favorite one is Allegiant which is free.
Having engaged and happy employees means a highly motivated self-driving team that is willing to contribute to the company’s success as much as they can. Dedicate time and resources to making your employees happy and you’ll easily turn them into your most loyal brand advocates.
Business Team Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “3 Ways to Build a Happier Team” was first published on Small Business Trends