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While bosses are generally known for a “tough love” style of management, recent developments in the understanding of workplace psychology have shown that employees should be made to feel valued for the sake of a business’s productivity. Finding ways to improve employee morale to that end may seem impossible, but it’s simpler than you think. Here’s what you need to know in order to motivate your employees to bring their A game to the office.
Provide Quality Amenities
Making sure that your employee’s basic needs are taken care of is so essential that you can’t really fail to do so. However, going a step further and providing the best version of the essentials can do a lot to improve the state of mind of your workers. Investing in top of the line commercial utilities for your business’s restrooms, for example, can give your employees a better quality of life in the workplace, and that will help to make going to work feel more comfortable and relaxing.
Keep Everything Tidy
Keeping a clean place of business is a crucial part of making your employees comfortable at the office. Dust can be an irritant to the senses and can cause respiratory issues in some cases, for example. This is especially true as it pertains to ventilation ducts that can become excessively dusty and can recycle the same dusty air, thereby creating an oppressively musty environment. Along the same lines, keeping the air filters of your air conditioning units clear of dust and debris is essential for maintaining the highest quality of air. Hiring professional cleaners is imperative for keeping your place of business clean and comfortable for your workers.
Offer Flexible Scheduling
The eight hour work day is a staple of modern life, but science regularly shows that it ultimately hurts productivity. Offering employees more of a say when it comes to the size and shape of their shifts can help you help them find the sweet spot in which they can give you their best and then head home. It’s important to note that this means not only allowing them to work shorter shifts, for example, but also more of those shorter shifts in order to continue to meet their existing number of hours for the sake of their wages.
Assign Appropriate Roles
The existing paradigm posits that an employee is a blank slate that can be applied to any position and even multiple different positions with little rhyme or reason. However, that’s just not how human beings operate. Instead, you should prioritize giving your workers the roles to which they are best suited. This has an immediate, positive effect on both the individual worker and your business as a whole, because people will simply do a better job when they are given a job at which they’re already skilled.
Offer Medical Insurance and Paid Medical Leave
When your employees miss work, you might feel like you’re losing out somehow. However, you can get another worker to fill in the gap in the schedule and allow the employee in question to make up their time elsewhere. A sick employee, on the other hand, is no doubt stressed about losing wages and risking their standing at work over a problem that is beyond their control. On top of that, medical attention can be costly without insurance, but employees are expected to provide written proof that they’ve seen a doctor to justify their absence. Paying employees that provide that evidence and offering them insurance options can help to make sure that you’re not punishing your employees for getting sick will work wonders for employee morale by eliminating an unnecessary stressor that impacts performance.
Improving employee morale is much more simple than it might seem. Your employees have needs comparable to your own, so trying to see things from their perspective will yield a number of options for you. These tips can help you get started, but always be ready to listen and learn.