Workplace culture is fast becoming the top focus for many employers today. Now, potential employees have begun to consider their options more carefully when searching for a new role. Businesses that reportedly have a particularly unwelcome and unpleasant atmosphere due to egotistical bosses, competitive environments, and inflexible rules are naturally less desirable for people to join, so striving to promote a healthy, friendly, and positive company culture benefits everyone.
Lower staff turnover, higher productivity for businesses, and a happier, more comfortable working environment for staff means that everyone can be much more content. Here are some of our best tips on creating and maintaining your own positive workplace culture and giving your employees a morale boost when needed.
Dictate Your Ethics Clearly
While this might not always factor into whether an employee chooses to work for your business or if a customer chooses to use your services or buy your products, having good ethics can be very important for your success. Avoid doing things that may jeopardise your public appearance, as your reputation is an incredibly important part of gaining further success. Even with great public relations, your business getting negative publicity due to the public’s ethical concerns can reduce your profits significantly when a certain percentage of your customers start to search elsewhere for products and services. Remember that bad publicity for you might cause great publicity for your competitors.
Encourage Innovation
Getting your team involved in how your company operates is a great way to show them you care about their input and trust and respect their views. Don’t forget that your employees are the ones that keep your business moving forward, and there’s a strong possibility that they’ll pick up on innovation opportunities that you may overlook.
So not only will this encourage your employees and boost their morale due to this added trust and inclusion into the wider business, but it may also present you with some useful and productive workarounds and methodologies. You never know; one of your employees may be the key to a huge breakthrough in the way you operate and could end up boosting your success significantly.
Promote Collaboration
A business where the entire team keeps to themselves and fails to help each other or work together is missing out on some useful benefits. A workplace that encourages collaboration and teamwork on projects and facilitates better communication between all staff members is more enjoyable to work in and is usually more productive. You’ll also find that when you allow and encourage your employees to work together, they’ll begin to impart knowledge on each other, strengthening the team as a whole.
Promoting collaboration means working with your team to help them come up with ways to work together. These might include hosting brainstorming sessions, putting staff together on collective projects or offering them alternative forms of communication. For example, if you only use email, then you could consider an instant messaging solution to make communication easier and more enjoyable for your team.
Be Inclusive
The awareness and adherence to changes in society are very important for business owners. Showing your understanding of issues surrounding gender, sexuality, race, and beliefs shows your employees that you care about them instead of seeing them as just replaceable workers. Inclusivity is important throughout your organisation and gives a wide range of benefits to you and your team. Demonstrate how much you value each individual in your team and strive to make every single person feel welcome. One of the best ways to do this is to encourage the careful use of language.
The words we use can hold incredible weight and power, and the wrong words used at the wrong time can be debilitating and demotivating for certain people. If you notice that there are any issues amongst your team concerning language used, consider inclusivity workshops before reprimanding individuals as a lot of the time, this can be due to ignorance rather than intentional offensiveness.
Offer Further Training
Workshops are a great option for your employees as this can help improve the way they work and increase their understanding of both social problems and new and useful working methods. In addition to these classes, you could also go a step further and provide them with a sense of progress in their careers by providing access to further training and online certificate courses from LSE. Searching for courses like this will help your team to develop their skills and gain more qualifications. It may also boost their productivity and ability within your business. It’ll also help to increase their morale significantly as they’ll be developing themselves and progressing their careers.
Communicate
As well as collaboration, communication can be just as important between your employees and between them and yourself. First, this communication and friendly discussion promote a healthy workplace environment, giving your team a good morale boost. Alongside this, it also allows you to gather a better understanding of what your team is happy with and what they’d like to change.
Remember to always encourage your team to provide feedback on the way they are working, and how they feel about the business itself. You may even find that your employees will learn about the way that competitors run things, especially if they’ve worked elsewhere in the industry, and you may be able to glean some useful information and advice.
Recognise Good Work
Rewarding your team is essential for keeping morale high and perpetuating a healthy work culture. But one of the things that do this very well, with minimal effort and resources, is simply recognising good work. Remember that, even though you’re paying your employees, they are still putting in a lot of effort when they provide you with great quality work. Paying your employees is not an excuse for never praising or recognising their work. At the end of the day, you must pay them, and they must work to survive. Your employees spend a majority of their lives furthering your business, and a simple “thank you” or “great job” goes a long way.
Provide Bonuses
When your employees start going above and beyond in their role, the right thing to do is to show your appreciation by offering them bonuses and rewards. It’s important to note that this is much riskier than you’d expect, though. There are several advantages and disadvantages to bonuses, so it’s worthwhile spending plenty of time deciding on this. It might encourage employees to work to the best of their ability in most cases, but sometimes it can be somewhat manipulative and encourage your team to overexert themselves. Depending on how you’ve laid out the bonus scheme, they may feel obliged to see those bonus goals as a new target instead of a reward.
This could lead employees who don’t reach this bonus goal to feel inadequate, and those who push themselves too much could burn out. To provide bonuses while maintaining a positive work environment, make sure that people know how much you appreciate the hard work of everyone, whether they’ve gotten a bonus or not. Also, don’t forget to keep the knowledge of who received a bonus and who didn’t receive one a secret to reduce competitiveness.
