When you’re a manager of a business, there’s a lot of responsibility placed on your shoulders. In addition to making sure the business runs as it should and turns a profit, you’re also responsible for making sure your employees feel happy, safe, and secure in the workplace, and that is arguably just as important – if not more – than every other aspect of running a business successfully.
Here are some tips you can take on board to ensure the health and productivity of each employee is looked after and maximized to their fullest potential.
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Make Your Office Comfortable
You’d be hard-pressed to find an employee who is happy in a dark, dirty, and cramped office. Instead, you want to make sure your staff have adequate space to move around and conduct their job in a way that’s comfortable to them. No one wants to be restricted, so give them a good size desk, a comfortable chair with decent back support, and plenty of light – preferably natural light if possible. This will really make all the difference to how your employees feel, because as you’ll likely know from personal experience, being uncomfortable is the worst thing and it makes it hard to be happy and productive when you have chronic backache and strained eyes.
In addition, you might consider hiring an office cleaner to make sure there’s no pressure for employees to clean and keep tings tidy on top of their day to day jobs. This will ensure the environment is always tidy and clean, and that employees don’t feel put out by a dirty environment that they don’t have the time to clean.
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Provide Snacks
Considering how much your employees do for you on a daily basis, the least you can do is provide them with good snacks throughout the day. In terms of their health, you can make sure the snacks you provide are healthy, like fruit, nuts, cereal bars, yoghurt and carrot sticks. Not only will this ensure your employees are getting decent nutrition throughout the day, it will make sure they’re not getting distracted by hunger, and it will make them feel like you’re genuinely concerned about their welfare, as you should be. Additionally, ask your members of staff for ideas for what they would like to see included, allowing them to contribute and taking some ownership over what comes into their working environment.
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Offer More Annual Leave
One way to make your employees feel happier is to show them that you recognize they have a life outside of work, and a good way to do that is to give them more than the minimum annual leave. People have things that crop up, and giving them just 28 days of leave per year doesn’t give them much time to live life the way they probably want to. More holiday will give them more time to spend with their families and doing things they want to do, like travelling, going to gigs and festivals, attending new classes and more.
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Give Positive Feedback
There are a number reasons why you should give your employees positive feedback; but mostly because it makes them feel more at ease and comfortable knowing that they’re doing a good job and are appreciated. Too often, people view positive feedback as coddling, but that’s not the case. If an employee doesn’t feel valued, they won’t be happy and they won’t be motivated to do a good job. This can be detrimental not only to their mental wellbeing and job satisfaction, but also to your business as a whole because employees who lack motivation typically produce lower quality work, and this is a reflection of your business.
So, in order to keep your employees happy, give them praise, make the office look nice, feed them and give them more time off! Try them and see what happens. Employees that feel valued are more likely to come into work feeling motivated and energized and, not only that, it will also aid your company’s job retention as valuable members of staff won’t be tempted into looking elsewhere for benefits that you are not offering.
