Research continues to show that a happy and positive workplace increases productivity, reduces staff turnover and engenders employee flexibility. Basically happy workers are more likely to say yes to extra responsibilities, stay for longer, collaborate and help boost morale.
“A happy workplace is a successful workplace”
Incorporating the following ideas into your workplace will soon have everyone smiling!
- Do Something You Love Every Single Day.
- Trust your team. Step out of approval. Instead, pre-approve and focus on supporting your people.
- Make your people feel good. Make this the focus of management.
- Pass the knowledge on to your people, so they don’t need things approved.
- Find a way to delight a customer today.
- Start meetings with a round of success stories — give people the opportunity to share the best of their week.
“The key to workplace happiness is the extent to which employers and employees engage with each other and have an open and meaningful dialogue”
- Find opportunities to laugh together.
- Don’t approve things: And resist the temptation to “improve” your people’s ideas.
- Give freedom within clear guidelines. People want to know what is expected of them. But they want freedom to find the best way to achieve their goals.
- Build the sharing of great stories about the achievements and success of the organisation into your induction programme. Get the owners of the stories to share their best moments of working for your company. This will help to inspire new recruits.
- Be open and transparent. More information means more people can take responsibility.
- Recruit for attitude, train for skill. Instead of qualifications and experience, recruit on attitude and potential ability.
- Ask your people what would make them happier. Then enable it.
- Celebrate mistakes. Create a truly no-blame culture.
- Help your people find a real challenge, and support them to achieve it.
- Community: create mutual benefit. Have a positive impact on the world and build your organisation too.
- Create an environment where people feel really proud to work there.
- Love work, get a life. The world, and your job, needs you well rested, well nourished and well supported.
- Avoid negativity. Choosing to be happy at work means avoiding negative conversations, gossip, and unhappy people as much as possible. No matter how positively you feel, negative people have a profound impact on your psyche.
- Equip and help people to work at home, if they want to.
- Focus on developing your people’s strengths, more than addressing weaknesses.
- Select managers who are good at managing. Make sure your people are supported by somebody who is good at doing that, and find other routes for those whose strengths lie elsewhere. Even better, allow people to choose their own managers.
- Play to your strengths – make sure your people spend most of their time doing what they are best at.
How happy does your job make you? What are some of the biggest stressors you encounter in your workplace and how do you get past them?
