3 Simple Ways to Make Staff Love Coming to Work
Staff are the first and sometimes the only direct experience our customers have with our business. Each staff member represents the face of the company. Dealing with happy staff makes for a much more enjoyable customer experience, so the best way to ensure satisfied customers is to have a happy team.
The Huffington Post released an article on ‘The Psychological Benefits of Having Things to Look Forward To,’ which explored how looking forward can positively impact our actions.
For example, the article found that if you’re looking forward to doing something (like going to work), you will be more motivated to accomplish tasks you would otherwise put off. It also makes you more optimistic about the future and happier in general.
If your staff love coming to work, it will make them more motivated, productive, and happier overall. But how do you make someone want to go to work?
It’s a common misconception that you must do your dream job to be happy, but you don’t actually need to be in your dream job to be satisfied. You just need to enjoy what you do, find value in it, and feel supported by your colleagues and managers.
This article will cover a few ways to boost the workplace atmosphere to make people feel more included, happier, and more motivated to work productively. Check them out below now to find ways of enhancing employee satisfaction!
1) Promote a Culture of Appreciation
Showing employees that you appreciate them and all the hard work they do for you is vital. If employees feel like you notice when they do good work, they will be more likely to come to work happy and ready to have a productive day.
But how do you help employees feel appreciated? We’ve got a few ideas below.
- Offer perks for hard work, like spa gift certificates, discounts for their favorite shops, and more. Not all incentives need to be monetary, either.
- Ensure you’re checking in with remote workers and keep lines of communication open.
- Encourage a healthy work-life balance. Consider giving employees Friday afternoons off and ensuring everyone gets their birthday off each year.
- Use a platform for employee recognition. Let people nominate their peers and encourage the whole team to show appreciation.
- Promote genuine transparency in the workplace. Have regular catch-ups and be candid when speaking about business growth and more. If you treat employees with openness and respect, they’re more likely to reciprocate.
An Idea to Show Your Appreciation: Themed Days
Source: Cloverleaf
Whether you do them monthly, seasonally, or annually, a simple but effective way to make your workplace more exciting is by having themed days. It is fun and gives your staff something to look forward to. Everyone can get involved, and it breaks up the monotony of the day-to-day business.
These days can include everything from pajama days in the office (yes, we’re suggesting you let your employees come to work straight from their bed) to throwback days (think the 70s🕺, 80s, and come what you wanted to be when you were a kid).
Having theme days could include having events throughout the day. For example, for Hawaiian shirt day 🌸, you could serve up a Hawaii-inspired lunch for your staff free of charge! Or you could conduct a team-building exercise, like a treasure hunt, on a pirate-themed day 🏴☠️.
While some of these suggestions may seem silly, it encourages your staff to have a laugh with each other. Avoid implementing these days when everyone is very busy; use them as a reward after busy seasons.
Shared experiences are extremely beneficial for teams. They can help people grow closer, communicate better, and build team identity. In addition, feeling like part of a team can positively impact motivation, leading to higher performance levels.
Themed days are also an excellent way to break up the day-to-day. Boredom and monotony can significantly impact morale and may contribute to higher stress levels. Introduce some excitement into your employees’ day with fun events like this!
2) Make Wellness a Priority
Source: Forbes
Wellness is an incredibly topical issue, with many people prioritizing it in their lives and careers. Ensuring your company focuses on wellness can show your staff that you care and help them improve their mental well-being.
Staff at companies that prioritize employee wellness are more likely to recommend the company as an excellent place to work to others. This means that if you treat your employees well, not only will they want to come to work, others will want to work for you too.
So, how do you incorporate wellness into your company culture? Below, we’ve come up with a few ideas.
Physical Health
Wellness isn’t all about meditation classes 🧘 and company yoga retreats. In fact, wellness can actually begin with simple things like providing healthy snacks 🍎 for staff in the break room, making lunch breaks mandatory (and ensuring people leave their desks during their lunch hour), and reinforcing the importance of taking time off when sick or burned out.
Physical health is just as important as mental health, so ensuring that your staff is physically healthy is the first step to improving morale at work. It can also reduce sick days!
Social
Socializing is critical to happiness. This has been researched and proven repeatedly, so allowing your employees to socialize with one another is an excellent way to make them feel happier at work.
Good ways to give your employees a chance to socialize include:
- Walking meetings: This is where, instead of commandeering a meeting room, you take your appointment on the road. Grab a coffee ☕ and get out into nature while catching up with colleagues.
- Work drinks and events: Having a place to socialize informally can help employees relax and get to know one another better.
- Team lunches: Another way to socialize is to grab lunch together. Take your team out for a treat on a Friday to say well done and to get everyone chatting.
Mental Wellness
Mental well-being is essential for happiness, so you should prioritize it for your employees. But what can you offer your employees to make better mental health accessible to them?
- Access to therapy or self-help mental health apps
- Guided meditation or yoga classes 🤸 during lunch breaks
- Workshops on stress management
- In-office massages 💆
- Resilience training
- Gratitude challenge (30 days of recording things you’re grateful for, etc.)
- Pet-friendly offices 🐕🦺
Financial and Professional Ideas
- Employee recognition: Set up a way to recognize employees who have worked hard, achieved something, or just constantly show up and offer excellent customer service.
- Performance reviews: While this can sometimes be intimidating to employees, working with your employees to develop their skills and help them to develop.
- Can actually improve employee retention and satisfaction.
- Give well-earned raises: Unfortunately, not all these ideas will be free. However, giving raises to employees who have earned them will lead to satisfied staff.
3) Provide Methods of Development
Source: Wharton Online
Providing your staff with a way for them to develop themselves shows them you care about their future. Lifelong learning is a key tenet of happiness, so giving employees the tools to do this will improve morale and make them want to come to work—mainly if they can dedicate a few hours a week to this development.
Helping employees to develop benefits you in a few ways. These include:
- Employees want the opportunity to develop. In fact, 49% of employees expect an employer to support career growth.
- It upskills your workforce, helping you to remain competitive in your industry.
- Learning and development can actually improve employee retention by up to 34%.
On top of these benefits for yourself, people who continue to self-develop throughout their lives are happier than those that don’t. This means that if you’re giving your workforce the tools for self-development, you will have a happier workforce overall.
A Note on How You Speak to Your Employees
Have you ever gotten an unexpected blowout from your staff over something you said during a shift? How you speak to employees can have a severe impact not only on their happiness and desire to be at work but also on how your team develops.
Delivering instructions or feedback sharply or aggressively can increase stress and lead to employees making more mistakes. In addition, if you come off as unapproachable to your staff, they will be less inclined to come to you when they have a problem. This could lead to bigger, more difficult-to-resolve issues down the line.
If you are not in a state where we can speak or it’s busy, tell the staff member you want to have a moment with them following their shift. That they aren’t in trouble, but you need to discuss something. It is challenging to communicate when things are busy, or deadlines are looming, so rather than being sharp with them due to time constraints, make an effort to set aside time to speak calmly.
Tips for speaking with employees that don’t alienate them are as follows.
- Say what we need to say in a calm, clear, and, if possible, warm/caring tone of voice. Don’t dress them down; if you need to critique them, do so when you’re not in the presence of other staff.
- Identify what is working while addressing what is not working. Don’t ever make communication entirely negative. Ensure they know you’re both working towards improvement and are not being told they are bad at their job.
- Ask them if they have questions or issues so that they can meet your expectations. Ensure you are precise when giving answers about methods for improvement.
- Verbally compliment staff when they do a good job or give exceptional service (not just pulling them aside when they mess up). Noticing staff efforts makes them feel valued and appreciated.
While there will be times when employees need to be corrected or critiqued, it is important to do so in a mindful way. You don’t want to alienate your staff or make them feel like they can’t come to you for support.
Ensure you catch problems early on so improvements are simple to make, and if an employee needs to be let go, do so compassionately.
How you speak with your employees can be the difference between them developing their skills and feeling too scared to do anything for fear of making a mistake.
Conclusion
Having happy employees will lead to more productive workers who want to come to work and do well each day. It is in your best interests to make employees love their jobs, so pull out all the stops to make it happen.
The initiatives we have suggested here are simple to implement and can be built upon to ensure you have satisfied employees and a positive work environment. Remember that happier employees like to offer excellent service to customers or clients and will spread the word that you’re a good workplace.
This means happy customers, increased employee retention, and a line of people wanting to work for a company that is really invested in job satisfaction.
- 3 Simple Ways to Make Staff Love Coming to Work
- 1) Promote A Culture Of Appreciation
- An Idea To Show Your Appreciation: Themed Days
- 2) Make Wellness A Priority
- Physical Health
- Social
- Mental Wellness
- Financial And Professional Ideas
- 3) Provide Methods Of Development
- A Note On How You Speak To Your Employees
- Conclusion
USA 
AU 
UK 
ES 
FR 
BR 
TH 
IN