How to ensure your employees are happy in the workplace
More than ever businesses are aware that taking care of employees is critical to their success (the bottom line) but ensuring employee happiness is complicated, difficult to manage and not a one-solution-fits-all problem.
Business success is often attributed to the workforce and so it should be! Without the committed staff who keep the cogs turning most businesses would fail to thrive and without the ability to thrive most would cease to be. But in this post-pandemic world, where businesses are evolving and changing at a great pace, expectations are far higher than they once were both from the business and the employee. The business landscape is now very different and job seekers are far more aware of employee wellbeing and will seek out only those businesses who appear to care. Keeping staff happy in the workplace is now a bigger challenge than ever before.
One of the biggest hurdles is understanding what employee happiness means to the individual. One person’s happiness looks very different to another’s and so understanding those needs, if you have five employees, may be somewhat less of a task than if you have 500 employees. But it needn’t be. The easiest way is to listen. Most people want to feel that they have a voice in the organisation they work for, that they are more than just a number and that they can be heard. Conducting an employee wellbeing survey is great but stuffing the results in a drawer will do nothing to enhance wellbeing.
I see all too frequently that the majority of issues employees have are typically nothing to do with the role they hold within an organisation but rather the relationships they have within that role. They may feel unappreciated, want more autonomy, feel mismanaged, unable to create a rapport with certain colleagues; there will be external factors that are infiltrating their day-to-day work-life and creating conflict. The issues themselves (particularly if personal) can’t necessarily be rectified but if the employee is heard and feels supported, this will go a long way to improving wellbeing within an organisation. It takes a personal approach.
We know that an employee’s salary and job role does not always relate to their wellbeing and happiness and an employer might think, ‘I pay this person to do a job, why does it have to be so complicated, surely they just need to get on with it’? Correct. But as Maslow* taught us, people have complex hierarchy of needs which, when left unfulfilled, will create a level of dissatisfaction. All business leaders know that fulfilling those basic needs for employees isn’t going to create employee happiness but failing to fulfil them will create employee unhappiness.
Businesses should actually be challenged to take that one step further.
“We invest in people; bring them into our organisations, train them within their roles, adopt CPD programmes. The list goes on. Ignoring their happiness will inevitably lead to that person and that investment being lost.”
This has an implication on both cost and resource. I’m often told that businesses can’t afford to dedicate resource to ensuring employee happiness on an individual basis. I challenge that thinking because actually, businesses can’t afford not to.
Giving employees across all levels of an organisation somebody to talk to, in a non-judgemental way, to provide mentorship and allow them to know they are being heard by somebody who can give them the tools to make changes, will create a feeling of empowerment and lead to better working ways and more productivity.
Well thought-out and considered employee wellbeing strategies are being adopted by businesses who really do care but who also understand the power of the happy employee.
It is all about the bottom line so don’t ignore those who will make your business a success!!
Book a demo to find out how we can help your staff thrive.
*Maslow - Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory of psychology explaining human motivation based on the pursuit of different levels of needs.
Alexandra Lichtenfeld - a workplace wellbeing specialist for 87% and business mentor who works with business owners, senior management teams and entrepreneurs changing the face of employee wellbeing, getting the best out of their business practices and employees.