Keeping Your Employees Happy

The ultimate satisfaction of your customers or clients with your products is largely dependent on the input of your employees. You and your employees make the team that can take your business beyond the sky. However, how you treat your employees can make or mar your business: it’s your decision.

Take your car, for an example, if you don’t service your car or pay attention to warnings, it can leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere someday. That’s how employees are. They are to be catered for and their satisfaction matters. Tips on how to keep your employees happy shall be given below.

Recognize their progress and accomplishments. Human beings love to be celebrated and appreciated. It gives up a sense of importance and satisfaction when someone notices our progress and commends us on our accomplishments, no matter how little they are. Employees try very hard to impress their employers. It is only right as an employer to recognize their progress and celebrate their accomplishments.

Have team building activities outside work. As an employer, see your employees as your teammates. As a captain, how do you then foster unity? You need activities that can evoke the team spirit. If you restrict the team building activities to work alone through team projects and the likes, you are only building temporal teammates. You need to have activities like sports where people can work as a team and display their skills freely.

Have trust and honesty. You can’t successfully build a team without being honest or without trust on both sides. Honesty begets trust. You have to show yourself to be honest to earn your teammates trusts. They have to be able to rely on you. When the business is going through a difficult time, your honesty and the trust in the team come to play. You’d be surprised how innovative people can be with solutions.

Show how they are part of the bigger picture. The bigger picture is the success and progress of the business. Let them see themselves as part of it. This is one way of motivating your employees to put in their best to work. When they can fully resonate themselves with the business and see themselves as part of it, innovation would come to play. One thing about human beings is the sense of belonging and attachment to something. Give them a sense of belonging in the business.

Prioritize work-life balance. Your employees have different lives outside work; you’ve got to recognize this. It motivates an employee to see that things are going on well outside work. The employee will have the peace of mind to do more. Allow the employees to have a balance in their lives. They’ve got to work and meet deadlines – yes, but they should have the time to see the life outside work. Thus, don’t enforce unfavorably long working hours; allow vacations; give some time off; you can have a “bring your child to work day” and have a children’s party.

Don’t overwork your employees. One of the major reasons why employees move from one workplace to another is the hours of work. Some employees are made to work 72 – 80 hours a week. That’s an average of 12 hours for 6 working days. This can be very frustrating and killing as there is hardly a life outside work. People don’t want to live to work; they want to do other things. It is not impossible for employees to fall sick after working for almost too long.

Set clear and concise goals. Let your teammates know these goals and understand them. Setting goals will help outline what to do to achieve these goals. Employees believe they have to work and it will help them if the work is targeted at an ascertainable goal.

Provide perks. Perks are benefits given to employees aside their salaries. Google has been rated as one of the best places to work in the world. Google focuses on getting the best out of its employees and it does this by providing several benefits from free rides in Wi-Fi-enabled buses to free chef prepared meals at work. A lot more benefits accompany these. Many companies have copied this style and it has proven to be very beneficial to them. Employees are motivated to be innovative and do more when there is a lot for them to gain and benefit from.

Support innovation. Things can’t continue to be the way they have been. Putting the same process to work will generate the same results. Employees can be very innovative when supported. Fortunately, innovation is what you need to be a trail blazer in this century. Don’t reprimand an employee for doing something differently.

Get to know your employees. Knowing your employees personally is one innovative way to get the best from them. There is set a personally responsibility to do better on that employee. More, this makes it easier for your employee to approach you. Many times, formality hinders expression. There need be some familiarity.

Provide tools for success. Apart from tools to get the work done, support and motivation are needed. Whatever is needed to get the job done successfully should be provided to employees. They want to work and achieve these goals and nothing should stop them.

Don’t keep score of bad results. Many employees have quit their jobs because their employers or superiors keep a record of their mistakes and shortcomings. Innovation is not encouraged when this occurs. The success of a company like Google cannot be disassociated from the constant encouragement of their employees to continually innovate and not care about mistakes they make while at it. Throw away the mistake log and be more supportive.

In conclusion, recruitment of employees is an arduous task that costs a lot. You have to retain and get the best out of the employees you have. Support, motivate, compensate, celebrate, and commend them.

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