The most successful organizations are led by their leaders, but driven by their employees.
Do you have a problem with high turnover? Are your best employees leaving en masse? Are there performance issues? The key to overcoming these challenges is employee happiness.
You may think that happiness is irrelevant in the workplace, but nothing could be further from the truth. Top leaders and companies care about the people and the culture in which they exist because they know they hold the key to the company’s ultimate success. Thomas Wright, a Kansas State University researcher who holds the Jon Wefald Leadership Chair in Business Administration and a professor of management, found that “when employees have high levels of psychological well-being and job satisfaction, they perform better and are less They are likely to quit their job. — make happiness a valuable tool to maximize organizational results.” Happy employees make employees more productive and that affects the bottom line, vitally important in this troubled economic climate.
Many studies have shown that the advantages of having happy employees in companies are:
* Increased productivity and quality of work.
* Less absenteeism, stress and burnout
* Low turnover
* Be a coveted place to work
* Increased sales and customer satisfaction
* Greater creativity and innovation.
* Be more flexible and open to change
* Better stock performance and bottom line
So how do you, as a leader, foster happiness in your employees? Here are 8 steps to get started:
1. Be happy yourself! Happiness is contagious. Happy leaders make happy employees.
Action: Take five uninterrupted minutes and think about it. How do I intend to feel today? Set your intentions for how you want to experience your day (ie calm, calm, joyful, positive, happy, etc.) Check in at the end of the day and see how much of your intended happiness actually showed up.
Action: Take five minutes at the end of your day and write down three things that made you happy that day. This is connecting with your inner happiness and highlighting what you are thankful and thankful for. This has been shown to make people happy if done consistently for a week and the effects have been known to last up to three months.
2. Encourage positive emotions. Foster an environment that fosters positive emotions such as enthusiasm and interest. Interested employees generally find their work meaningful because they perceive their work to have value to the organization. They feel that they are a valuable part of the team and that they are making an overall contribution to the profitability of the organization.
Action: Affirm and acknowledge your employee in every conversation and connect what you appreciate with the value they bring to your organization.
3. Limit negative emotions. Negative emotions such as apathy, sadness and stress damage the results of companies. Thomas Wright took a sample of managers with median salaries of about $65,000 and found that “being psychologically distressed could cost an organization about $75 per week per person in lost productivity. With 10 employees, that translates to $750 per week in variance of productivity.” performance; for 100 employees, the numbers are $7,500 per week or $390,000 per year. Be aware of negative emotions that can harm the work environment and take steps to minimize them.
Action: Train your employees to write a vision of what work and life would be like without useless stress. Then ask them “What is getting in the way of realizing this vision?” Once they answer this question, you can help them break through the barrier and change the habit.
4. Promote humor and fun. Provide opportunities for colleagues to get to know each other. When employees like each other, they are happy. Host celebratory gatherings, birthday parties, picnics, sports teams, games between competing teams, and charity events. Such activities encourage interaction and communication between coworkers, which in turn will allow them to feel more connected to each other.
Action: Ask your team of employees “What can we do to have more fun together?” Implement one of the ideas within a month.
Action: Call an “employee happiness” task force to meet without management and create an ongoing plan for uniting and building the employee team.
5. Celebrate the results. Recognize your employees for their successes, achievements, and results. Do this during performance reviews and publicly. When people know they are appreciated for their contributions to the organization, when they can use their strengths every day, and when they know they are making a difference, they are happier.
Action: Begin each meeting with “What’s going well? What are you accomplishing? What are you excited about?” affairs.
Action: Ask for volunteers to create a “Rewards and Celebration” system for your organization.
6. Offer opportunities for work-life balance. Work-life conflicts affect everyone. When such conflicts arise, apathy sets in and employees may show up late, call in sick, or take extra-long lunches. They will eventually quit and that will cost the company a lot of money. Experts have estimated that replacing it costs between 93% and 200% of an employee’s salary. Smart leaders will take steps to eliminate such work-life conflicts. Strategies that can retain employees include flexible hours, extended leaves, job sharing, on-site day care, elder care assistance, and concierge services.
Action: Listen to the individual employee’s needs, wants, and desires and customize a benefit to meet that employee’s needs.
7. Make sure company communications are open and honest. Make sure company newsletters are not press releases or office memos. Make them personal and candid to build trust and openness between staff and management. In fact, make sure press releases and office memos are personal and candid, too.
Action: Make a personal phone call or visit with each employee weekly or at least monthly.
Remember the first question: “What is going well?” Then, acknowledge or affirm their accomplishments.
Action: Contribute to the team by participating in meetings. See yourself as a member of the team.
8. Create a lively “learning” environment. The key to your leadership success lies in creating a “learning” environment, a new kind of business architecture that fosters a culture in which employees can learn, solve problems, challenge the perspectives of others, and go above and beyond. current knowledge, skills and attitudes. .
A “learning” environment promotes honesty, direct communication, the confidence to express one’s opinion without negative consequences, and the ability to recreate ideas and solutions in one’s own context. The environment encourages employees to play with new skills and try new attitudes in a “safe” setting with colleagues.
Action: Put personal and professional development first. That all professional development and learning point to the mission of the company.
Action: Ask “So what? We’ve learned this, so what difference does it make in my ability to perform and achieve the desired results?”
Remember that you cannot force your employees to be happy (they are ultimately responsible for their own happiness), but you can foster an environment in which it is easy to be happy. That is your responsibility as their leader. Be happy!