At CiC, we believe that every day we should cultivate happiness within the workplace.
When you boost happiness at work you will see employee engagement rocket. Simply, a happy workforce is a productive one!
Did you know that happy employees outperform competitors by 20%, with 37% of ‘happy’ salespeople closing 37% more sales?
When you have demotivated employees, often you will see more absences, increased conflict, lower retention rate as well as a decrease in performance.
Although happiness starts at the top, with the leader, the responsibilities lie with everyone within the organisation to ensure they are looking out for their peers.
Progress in the workplace should be about increasing happiness of both internal and external people.
Measuring happiness
However, getting an idea of whether your workforce is truly ‘happy’ is unclear and there is no measurement that can show happiness, but a combination of a contributing factors.
More than one in five employees in the UK often feel exhausted, 22% are under excessive pressure and 11% often feel miserable at work – this indicates a serious health risk. There are many factors behind wellbeing, stress and burn out in the workplace. These can include:
- Long hours
- Heavy workload
- Tight deadlines
- Job insecurities
- Lack of opportunities
- Change to job role
- Over/under supervision
- Poor relationships with peers or bosses
- Harassment/discrimination/bullying
- Every workplace is different, each with a variety of bespoke issues. However, there are several methods to put into place that improve overall happiness in the workplace.
Identifying unhappiness in your workplace
It is important to identify when your employees are unhappy to ensure you react and rectify any issues accordingly.
These can be categorised into 3 types of symptoms – physical, psychological and behavioural.
Physical symptoms could include fatigue, muscular tension, headaches, insomnia, heart palpitations as well as gastrointestinal issues.
Psychological symptoms can be harder to identify in others, these could include depression, anxiety, irritability, discouragement, lack of concentration or feeling overwhelmed.
Behavioural symptoms are easier for you to notice, including increase in absenteeism, aggression, decrease in performance, mood swings, frustration, along with disinterest and isolation.
Transform your workplace into a happy one
To ensure your employees feel fulfilled with increased training and development, as well as a healthy work life balance by allowing for flexible working, better working relationships and giving your team a voice in how their workdays are run.
Discover a number of methods that can be put into place to improve employee happiness:
- Rearrange your office space to ensure there is a designated area away from desks or work stations for recharging and unwinding, this can be with sofas, office games or even a canteen. Anything to ensure your employees feel appreciated – as feeling underappreciated is the top reason for employees quitting their jobs.
- Ensure there is a clean distinction between work and home life, however, we understand that often deadlines crop up or cover is needed. Allowing for a flexible work-life balance will avoid ‘burn out’ – take the time to talk with your employees, working out what you can do to help them achieve the work and allowing for time to switch off. This will make your people feel more valued – increasing productivity.
- Keep everything transparent, everyone needs to be clear with all aims and intentions of the business, understanding their own duties. Not only celebrating success but also highlighting any issues can create a sense of community as well as being a smarter way of finding solutions. Transparency builds trust within your team, showing you are confident with their abilities.
- Increasing communication will build a stable team that wants to work hard together to achieve the same goals – if you cut out communication and fail to listen to their concerns it will leave your employees feeling under-valued.
- Everyone needs an opportunity to grow within your team, set personal goals and objectives for employees to give them a sense of achievement and the motivation they need to work towards the next goal. Allowing for a climb in the ladder and increasing both personal and professional growth can in turn reduce staff turnover. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a promotion but encourage their personal training and allocate time to take courses that help develop employees’ skills and development.
- It is not only important to encourage socialising within work time, but also out of work hours too. Improving business culture reduces stress levels, allowing employees to ‘switch off’ in a happier and more productive environment. Hosting engaging events will encourage friendships within the workplace and allow co-workers to connect on a personal level.
- As said in Psychology Today, ‘Vacations are a necessity, not a luxury!’ As a team leader you should encourage your team to take their annual leave, allowing for R and R from the everyday stresses.
- Encourage peer engagement too – by encouraging your team to recognise their colleagues’ efforts, an introduction of an ‘employee of the month’ scheme which allows for individual recognition and personal satisfaction.
At CiC, we understand that sometimes to fix the increasing problem of poor mental and physical health in the workplace, it takes an external professional.
CiC provide a range of employee assistance programmes which offer your organisation access to 24/7/365 independent and completely confidential support and advice.