March 2017
Smiles All Round: How to Keep Your Team Happy Without Breaking the Bank
Perhaps it’s because everybody knows that a happy team is a productive team that we now live in a world where offices have ball pits, and organisations strive to have the most impressive benefits package possible. Unfortunately, not all businesses have the spare cash to essentially ‘buy’ their employees’ happiness. So how do you reap the benefits of a happy team without breaking the bank?
Introduce Remote Working
A hugely popular option – especially in start-up culture – is to allow employees to work remotely. Whether that means they get to work from a café one day a week or they’re totally independent of the office is up to you, but it’s a sure-fire way to spread some joy.
Studies have shown that remote working has a number of happiness-inducing benefits, including improved productivity, better staff health and even loyalty. What’s more, it won’t cost you anything – in fact, there’s the opportunity to save money with reduced office usage. Win-win!
Create Line-of-Sight
Particularly as an organisation grows, it becomes easy for individuals to feel like their impact upon the company has been lost. This most often comes down to a disconnect between what they’re doing day-to-day not lining up in their minds with the objectives of the organisation. Eventually, this will lead to disillusionment and feelings of frustration and unhappiness, and you’re likely to lose an employee.
Prevent this from happening by setting some time aside to work on creating line-of-sight between individual efforts and the organisation’s objectives. If employees can see how their work is contributing to the success of the business, they’re much more likely to feel happy and fulfilled – and the business benefits from everybody being on the same page.
Encourage Team Bonding
Interpersonal relationships carry a great potential for creating happiness in the workplace, so it makes sense to encourage your team to bond with one another. In the office, this could be accomplished by hot-desking or collaboration between different teams. Outside the office, a few post-work drinks or the opportunity to attend a business event together can help to bring people closer.
Listen to Their Feedback
One of the easiest ways to ensure employee happiness is to listen to what they have to say and act on it. Of course, criticism can be hard to take and even harder to give, which is why we’d suggest using affordable software such as Officevibe to collect anonymous feedback from your team. Officevibe collates the information it gathers and presents it in a simple to understand format, alongside suggestions on how to improve employee engagement and happiness.
Give Them the Tools They Need
Often, unhappiness and frustration among employees can come as a result of them lacking the tools they feel they need to complete their jobs. This can involve long, protracted processes and systems which are laden with bugs. Consider instead a bespoke CRM solution which combines communication capabilities with data collection, high quality reporting and third party app support, built to reflect the changing needs of your team.
With everything they need to get the job done to the best of their abilities, you’ll find the workplace a much happier place to be!
Want to help put a smile on your employees’ faces with a bespoke CRM solution built to their needs? Get in touch for a free demo to experience happiness first hand.