How happy and motivated are your employees?
If they’re not the happiest or simply doing their jobs to get by, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. According to a recent survey, companies that invest in employee happiness outperform the competition by more than 20%.
You might wonder why investing in your employees’ happiness is necessary as an employer. After all, you pay them to do what you hired them.
Well, that notion isn’t going to give your company an edge. Knowing how to boost employee morale and motivation goes a long way to improving workplace productivity and the organization’s financial performance.
Continue reading for practical tips and advice on motivating and putting a smile on your employees’ faces.
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1. Competitive Compensation
As an employer, you’re always keen on hiring people passionate about their jobs. However, if you aren’t matching their passion with competitive compensation, it’s only time before they become disengaged from their work.
The hard fact is every worker wants to be paid well. Students are racking up huge debts to secure an education, and they aren’t going to settle for peanuts when they enter the workforce. Earning a healthy income is key to paying student loans faster.
You aren’t just empowering your workers’ financial lives when you pay competitive salaries. You’re also giving them one less reason to worry. They’ll be more motivated to come to work and put in proper shifts.
Understandably, the economy isn’t easy on businesses, and paying top salaries isn’t feasible, but that doesn’t mean you have no solutions. Be creative with your compensation packages. For example, you can pay an average salary but throw in performance-based bonuses and other financial incentives.
2. Employee Wellness Program
If your company doesn’t have an employee health and wellness program, it’s time to implement it. Investing in your employees’ health and wellness is key to improving workplace happiness, job satisfaction, and team productivity.
If your employees are often ill, they’ll stay at home. Even if they come to work, their productivity will decline. As such, prioritizing their health and wellness has a direct impact on the performance of your business.
Design your wellness program to meet the unique wellness needs of your employees.
For instance, if your business has a typical office environment where employees spend most of their time sitting, you want a program that encourages physical activity. If your work environment involves a lot of physical work, such as construction, the program should focus on mental health wellness.
Ultimately, the primary goal of any wellness program is to reduce sick-off days and help ensure employees are as healthy as possible throughout the year. Your employees will appreciate your efforts to take care of their health, and they’ll reward you with greater productivity.
3. Diversity and Inclusion
How diverse and inclusive is your organization?
If recent surveys are anything to go by, the average workplace has much to do to be more diverse and inclusive. Companies that have embraced diversity report having employees who are happier, more motivated, and more satisfied with their jobs.
What are you doing to make your business more diverse and inclusive? Of course, racial diversity is the first thing that comes to mind. Ensuring a fair representation of all races is crucial, but there’s more to DEI.
It would be best to look at gender, religious background, age, and disability, among other factors.
Your employees want to see that people like or look like them in the workplace. Picture a scenario where a company has ten male and one female employee. Whichever way you look at it, there’s no way the sole female employee will feel wanted in that workplace.
Hire a DEI consultant to audit your organization and recommend measures you should take to make it more diverse and inclusive.
4. Team Building Activities
You do your best to recruit the right worker for each role, but that’s only half the job. The other half is ensuring your employees can work as a team. After all, teamwork makes the dream work!
There are several strategies for transforming a group of employees into a team. For example, you can put them into groups and encourage them to work together. Sharing the mission and goals of your organization with your employees can also motivate them to work as a team.
However, your efforts won’t count for much if they aren’t engaging in team-building activities. These activities are the glue that strengthens the bonds between your employees.
Team-building exercises can be done internally or externally. However, to break the monotony of the workplace, it’s advisable to find suitable locations and hold your exercise there. For example, if your company is based in Australia, there are plenty of team building activities in Canberra.
External team-building exercises allow employees to relax, unwind, and explore new regions. They’ll come back motivated and ready to conquer.
5. Employee Training
Employee training is so essential that, in a survey, 68% of respondents said training and development is an organization’s most important policy.
Your employees might be qualified for their roles, but their occupational knowledge and skills can quickly become outdated in a fast-paced workplace environment. Regular training helps update their skills, which keeps them performing optimally. Such employees are typically more engaged because they know they can do their jobs well.
Don’t ignore employee training. It’s more cost-effective to upskill your current employees than going into the labor market and recruiting fresh hires with the skills you’re looking for.
6. Job Flexibility
Although working from home has been gaining popularity over the last decade, it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic it caught up. Almost everyone wants it, and research shows employees who work from home are happier and more productive.
As an employer, you might have reservations about letting employees work remotely, where it’s harder to supervise them. However, you have little choice as job flexibility is a key factor in boosting the morale of today’s workers.
Allowing your employees to work from at least one or two days a week will undoubtedly make them happier.
Learn How to Boost Employee Morale and Motivation
Your employees are your greatest assets. Knowing how to boost employee morale and motivation is key to running a successful organization.
This guide lets you know some of the best strategies you can deploy. From paying good salaries to investing in employee training and building a diverse and inclusive workplace, there’s a lot you can do to get your people firing on all cylinders.
Find more workplace resources and advice in the business section of our blog.