October 5 2019 - When you're running a business, it's easy to forget that your staff's happiness and wellbeing is an incredibly important factor in the way your company operates and interacts with the world. While you're busy making long-term plans and financial models, it's understandable that you might overlook the strain and stresses that you're handing down to your employees – all of who produce worse work if they're unhappy and unsatisfied. Here, you'll learn how to keep staff members happy, ensuring that they're willing and ready to work for you when the going gets tough for your business.
Salaries and Bonuses
One of the key identifiers of a good workplace is the value you invest in your staff. It's clear that one of the key ways that you can show that you value your team is through regular salary raises for great work or bonuses for a particularly impressive performance across a month. Monetary bonuses are just one way to reward staff, though – you might also:
- Organize a group trip as a reward for all your employees
- Bring in entertainment, food, and drinks for a Friday of celebration
- Organize discounted goods from suppliers to give to your customers
- Keep an ‘Employee Of The Month’ scheme running to recognize excellent work
If you're regularly showing that you care about the work that your employees are putting in, and you appreciate their efforts, you'll have a happier workforce as a result.
One-on-Ones
Another way to keep staff happy and stress-free in their roles is to schedule regular meetings with each member of the team that works directly beneath you. By doing this, you’ll be able to ensure that each and every member of staff you manage is granted the time and space to air any frustrations they might have, whether that comes in the form of being over-worked, under-worked, under-appreciated or simply too stressed to handle their workload. The insights into your company's performance that you can glean from these meetings are incredibly vital for your business planning, and in keeping your staff feeling that you're on their side.
Give Them Great Tools
There's nothing more frustrating and difficult than working on old, slow computers and with clunky, retro programs and software packages. If you're running an office in which computers regularly freeze, and software programs are not fit-for-purpose, you're going to find your staff less productive, and less happy to be working for your business. The tip here, therefore, is to seize your opportunity to upgrade the tools your staff use. You can do this by:
- Buying new hardware, like computer terminals and screens, to produce quicker work
- Ensuring that all your software packages are up to date and working fluidly
- Onboarding external assistance to help your staff, like the website testing experts at Digivante
- Organizing regular training sessions to upskill your workers so that they’re more efficient in their roles
All of these elements will come together to form a more solid team – one in which you are communicating regularly with happy staff who are producing excellent, high-quality and efficient work for you and your company long into the future.