As the head of your company, you are not only in business for a paycheck, but you want your workplace to thrive. Creating a positive and inviting yet productive place of business does not have to be a pipedream. You can turn it into an attainable reality by following these tips. Continue reading to learn more.
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Focus on the happiness factor at work
Being happy at work is important. That is the case not only for your and your employee’s personal satisfaction and good feelings, but it is essential for everyone’s overall well-being and mental health. By implementing the practices found in positive psychology, you and your team will reap the benefits of its basic tenets.
The basic concepts of positive psychology in the workplace incorporate positivity, as the name implies. But it is more than that. This practice involves optimizing each individual’s character strengths and focusing on what is good about them. In addition, the act of finding meaning and purpose through their respective roles at work is a way to help employees feel valued beyond their job descriptions.
Learning their inherent value and how they positively and proactively contribute to the success of the company is a circular event. When they feel good about themselves and what they can do, they routinely tend to do better, which consistently results in wanting to set the bar higher to continue to achieve more success for themselves and the company at large. In other words, happiness breeds positive success.
(Re)Introduce soft skills for all
After a rough few years across the world, continued political discord, and a proclivity toward emulating the behaviour on not-so-reality shows, people may benefit from a refresher class on how to get along. Whether it is due to a lack of socializing, how someone was raised, or their own personal preferences to act in a certain way, everyone needs a reminder from time to time on how to get along with those who simply act in a different way or believe in something else.
This is where soft skills come into play. You might need to offer a refresher course or a full-on introduction, depending on any concerns or lack of civility in your place of business. This is not to say that you are attempting to indoctrinate any one or all of your employees into your way of thinking. No. In fact, soft skills will aid people in learning how to have positive discourse and disagree while respecting another’s right to believe something different.
When the people you employ are able to communicate effectively, they will achieve a happier work life through the lessening of anger and arguments. In addition, collaboration and cooperation will increase and be celebrated. People are entirely too different to believe in one thing. Your clients are different, as well, and when you can relate to them on a respectful level as your team does with one another, they will all take notice and form a more positive view of your company’s ethos and values.
Respect the boundaries of your team
Before the advent of the ubiquitous smartphone that almost acts as another appendage, there were boundaries between an employee’s workplace, professional responsibilities, and personal time. Now that you have a way for you, your supervisors, and coworkers to reach your employees at any time they so choose, it is difficult to determine clear boundaries.
Set a line of demarcation, albeit invisible, between when an employee is on the clock or off duty. For starters, their work times must be clearly stated in their respective job descriptions. If that has not been accomplished to date, it must be done immediately. After taking care of this and running it through the Human Resources department to ensure accuracy and accountability, ensure work hours are discussed with the applicable employees. You can even bring them into the conversation earlier to get their input on the best or most appropriate work times based on their job position and other applicable logistics.
The next step is to respect these clearly marked boundaries. If an employee is done working for the day, they should not receive work emails or texts until the next business day unless it is part of their job description. You and your team can still create messages, but you should schedule them to automatically send in the morning just before work begins. Should anything change regarding your need for specific employees to be on and available outside of work hours, the job description and appropriate compensations need to be discussed and amended right away.
Watch this video to learn how people should advocate for themselves to easily set boundaries at work.
That could have been an email
How many times in your work life have you received a summons to a training session or a long-winded sit-down spiel in the company’s conference room? You are not alone. It seems that more and more upper and middle management personnel are calling everyone into meetings that really could have been avoided entirely and handled differently.
Make a change in the way your company and those in charge handle and value everyone’s time at work. Sitting through training sessions and meetings that have valuable content and need to be conducted in person is one thing, but when some topics and communications can be addressed with minimal time commitments, they should be. Encourage your team to send more concise and targeted, yet less frequent, communications throughout the day unless there is active collaboration going on.
If a training session can be accomplished via a comprehensive slide deck, do that instead of pulling everyone away from their important projects. If the content of a conference can be addressed via an email or quick conference call, choose that for the benefit of work productivity and efficiency. Your staff will thank you.
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Just because the word work shows up in the workplace does not mean that the entire effort of growing your business has to be, well, work. Reframe your entire company’s approach to how you do business by utilizing the best practices found in positive psychology, helping your team more effectively communicate with one another, and respecting everyone’s boundaries – yours included. When you focus on the positive, everyone else will, too.
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