An appealing workplace environment can significantly impact the productivity of your employees. Your employees’ work life can also affect their engagement and absence levels. Often, your employees’ desire to succeed professionally can push them to set aside their well-being. Creating a work-life integration and work-life balance is crucial to improve their mental, emotional, and physical well-being. The following are three easy changes to improve your employee’s work life.
1. Invest in a Good Office
The first change you can make to improve your employees’ work life is to move them into a new office. When choosing a new office, carefully consider staff needs. Apart from considering customer requirements, space, and cost, it would help if you also looked at factors such as proximity to food outlets and local amenities, staff parking, and whether the office is airy, spacious, and pleasant.
The lighting in the workplace should be sufficient for the tasks at hand and of good quality, and the ventilation should work well. Take measures to reduce noise pollution from the inside and the outside of the office, and nicely decorate the office with wall art and light pleasant colors. After occupying the premises, ensure that hygiene standards should be maintained to high standards, maintenance kept at top-notch, and repairs completed on time. Invest in little things like lovely furnishings, plants, cutlery and crockery, free access to coffee and tea, and hand soap in the washrooms.
2. Listen to Your Workers and Encourage Work-Life Balance
You cannot fix a problem if you do not know about it. You may know that employees need a good work-life balance, but knowing about it does not help you accomplish it. So, your employees are better positioned to let you know how you can improve this balance from their experience. You can obtain this information by conducting a survey on various balance-related issues of your company flexible scheduling, hours worked, support for nursing mothers, and much more. The survey will help identify specific areas that your company needs to improve to allow your employees to implement achievable solutions for issues that affect them.
Presenteeism is a culture that leads to less productivity, resentment, and low motivation; therefore, you should do everything to discourage the culture. Suppose your employees are comfortable working from home, deal with family issues, take time off for medical purposes, or work flexibly around personal needs. In that case, you should allow them to do that. This leads to greater satisfaction and staff loyalty, which results in better staff retention and higher productivity.
3. Appreciate and Support your Staff
Let your employees know that they are doing a good job and recognize them for that. You can do this by just saying a simple thank you, well done, publicly thank the employees during a meeting, or offer a bonus or award. Your employees should also have high autonomy levels to achieve job satisfaction; therefore, you should facilitate this by allowing your staff to decide and control their work.
Consider how much you are supporting your staff and ensure the people who need the support are the ones receiving it. Prioritize training and staff development, and ensure that members of staff who obtain new skills get an opportunity to put their skills into good use. You can also make it easy for your employees to obtain your pay stub by providing a check stub generator.
Social interaction is essential in creating collaboration among team members. Therefore, you should encourage social interaction in and out of the office to make your employees happier. Social interaction can be facilitated by organizing events such as summer get-togethers, Christmas parties, team lunches, cycling or running groups, workplace choir, or cake-sharing. Team building events away from regular informal meetings and the office to get employees away from the work environment and socializing with each other can help build relationships. Improved working relationships make the workplace a happier environment and also lead to work benefits through improved collaboration.
Final Thoughts
It is essential to be ahead of emerging work-life balance trends to be on the benefiting side. A trend that is working today might not be applicable next year. Therefore, work-life balance initiatives should be kept fresh and provide in-demand benefits.
