Tips for Keeping Employees Happy and Motivated

No company can become successful with brooding and unmotivated employees. In fact, marketing research has connected business success to employee satisfaction. Ideally, you would want your employees to give their all to your company. Motivated employees take the initiative without having to be told. Happy employees are better at making decisions than stressed employees. It’s actually in your best business interest to keep workers happy. Here are several tips for creating a workplace environment where employees can be both:

Develop Workplace Guidelines for Employees

When you hire a group of employees, not everyone in this group will have the same personality. As with school, it’s important to maintain rules and guidelines for employees at work. Most companies write these guidelines down in an employee handbook. This employee handbook tells workers the sort of behavior and conduct that is expected at work. This also protects the company legally. If an employee misbehaves, you can use the guidebook as a defense to fire. If certain extreme cases end up in court, a guidebook can be used in your defense to show that the company never intended a harmful work environment. You should get expert and legal help when writing this guidebook. Get a company analysis, like Global Resources Business Reviews, to perfect the employee handbook.

Ensure Workplace Safety

As an employer, it is your responsibility to ensure workplace safety for all employees. Now, workplace safety spans several areas. There are obvious safety rules, like getting construction workers to wear protective helmets. Then there are other, less obvious, safety measures businesses should take. For example, all employees should be protected from harmful behavior like sexual harassment, bullying, or hazing at work. Protecting employees’ person is easier than ensuring their psychosocial well-being, of course. What you can do for issues like harassment is to set up a strong HR department with the power to immediately act upon any complaints. Do invest in the HR department to solve workplace disputes before things escalate.

Allow Employees Breaks

No one can work for more than three or four hours straight without a break. Therefore, do allow mini breaks for employees who might need those. Instead of offering an hour long lunch break, cut down lunch time to half an hour, and allow three other short breaks. Sometimes workers just need to get up and stretch before concentrating once more.

Reward Those Who Make the Extra Effort

Rewards can help keep employees motivated and ambitious to do more. Companies can reward excellent and good behavior. More importantly, companies should reward those employees who don’t hesitate to make extra effort to get things done properly. These are the employees who stay late to make sure a task is finished, or don’t mind showing up on the weekend for the sake of a project. Reward such employees to motivate everyone.

If the business strikes gold with a project, don’t forget to share that success with the employees. It’s important to let everyone know that success for the company means success for everyone involved. Award bonuses whenever necessary and your employees will be happy to follow you to the ends of the earth.