Frederick Jace
It’s no secret that finding a way to keep your employees satisfied and motivated improves the experience of working at your company, betters the products or services or work for your teams complete, and produces higher income and growth over time. This being said, it can be challenging to figure out what exactly should be done to boost employee satisfaction and motivation. The following will explore a few of the things you can do to help bolster the experience of your employees and cultivate productivity and an enjoyable atmosphere.
Change Your Perspective On What A Job Is
Many people tend to view their employees as people who can get stuff done for them. While this is correct, it’s only a small part of the overall exchange that is going on. You’re also creating the experience that could very well make up one-third of your employee’s life. The average person spends 90,000 hours of their life at work, one-third of their day (and sometimes even more than this). So you’re not just cultivating a small part of someone’s life; you’re creating up to a third of it (half of their waking life if you think that one third is spent sleeping). That’s a massive responsibility. Whether someone’s life is good, meaning something they’re pleased with, or bad, meaning something they’re not happy with has a great deal to do with their work. People’s work is their life, and you should treat it as such.
Sort Out Compensation Packages
No matter how stellar a work environment is if someone is stressed about money or freaking out because their kid needs an expensive prescription and they’ve got a chipped tooth that is starting to hurt them, and they don’t think they’re ever going to be able to afford to have it fixed, they’re not going to be doing a good job. Anxious employees are not present, and their work suffers as a result; their workplace relationships grow weaker as they’re more likely to have a short temper. Moreover, if someone is feeling unwell, is in pain, or has another form of health issue, they’re not going to be as focused on their work as pain will be getting in the way. Figure out payroll and ensure that your employees have what they need to make ends meet and tend to their health and the health of their families. Distracted employees get less work done.
Be Respectful Of Their Time
Meetings, for some dreaded reason, have become a symbol of a modern workplace. The only problem is, quite often, a meeting could have been an email, and now you’ve got sixteen employees who lost an hour of work time and so are now behind on what they were hoping to have finished by the end of the day. Meetings should only be held when absolutely necessary and should only include the people who have to be there. If someone isn’t contributing to the conversation, their time could be better spent elsewhere—you can send them an email about the meeting’s conclusion if they need to be aware of that. Make it company policy that anyone who does not feel they’re adding value to a meeting or receiving value from it can walk out. Explain to your staff that leaving a meeting shouldn’t be considered rude; what’s rude is wasting someone’s time when they’re trying to get a job done.
Learn About Environmental Psychology
It turns out that the physical environment humans are in—the rooms with their furniture, lighting, and aesthetic choices—has a drastic impact on how happy they are in the space and how focused and how creative. Something as simple as laying out desks so that employee’s backs are to the wall can improve focus (humans still have a lot of their wilderness survival instincts, and if someone is in a position where a bear can sneak upon them, they’re not relaxed and they’re not fully focused as a percentage of their mind is always focused on the space behind them).
A well-designed workplace can result in greater creativity, focus, mental clarity, energy, and productivity and reduce symptoms of depression, stress, and anxiety. No matter what aesthetic direction you decide to go in, be sure to include plants. Since plants clear the air of toxins and produce oxygen, they can bolster focus and motivation (if a room has too many people and no plants, the oxygen levels drop). You also want to think about color psychology when you’re learning about the impact an environment can have on people’s mental states; that trendy grey that everyone feels is very modern increases rates of depression. Orange bolsters creativity and collaboration. White facilitates calm.
The above information should help you improve employee satisfaction and motivation in the workplace. But, of course, this is only the beginning; once you begin studying organizational behavior, you’ll realize that there are countless ways to improve your workplace.
