Were you being happy at work? That’s for when you’re off the clock. You’ve heard the expression, “That’s why they call it to work.” Isn’t that the way work has always been?
Not anymore.
A recent study, “Happiness and Productivity,” conducted by a pair of economist academics, has proven that happiness makes people more productive on the job.
According to one of the authors of the research, Professor Andrew Oswald, there’s data to back up the claim: “Companies like Google have invested more in employee support and employee satisfaction has risen as a result. For Google it rose by 37%. They know what they are talking about. Under scientifically controlled conditions, making workers happier really pays off.”
This research shows that happiness isn’t a luxury afforded by high-value Silicon Valley firms. Team happiness is not something that organizations can ignore but rather a crucial investment in staff morale, retention, and productivity.
Whether you’re leading a small team or a large enterprise, there are practical methods for keeping your team happy while still meeting management’s targets. Here are three tips for building comfortable and productive teams.
Be a Better Communicator.
If you’re not able to articulate what you want people to do, they will not be able to do it. That’s obvious. What may not be clear is that by being a poor communicator, you’re corrupting the bonds of trust between you and your workers, which will create a toxic work environment over time.
How do you communicate more effectively and, in so doing, help make a happier team?
- Listen- a lot. Communication is a two-way street. Put aside your thoughts and ideas to listen to people on your team and demonstrate that you’re willing to engage their ideas seriously. You can show that you’re listening (and remember what your team has said) by repeating what you’ve heard them say.
- Stay on topic. When you’re doing the talking, don’t confuse the issue by going off on tangents. Have one conversation at a time, and keep your point short and easily digestible.
- Look people in the eye. This may seem like an old-fashioned idea since we all stare at our phones and multitask these days. Eye contact helps you and the listener focus on the topic at hand and shows you’re focusing on listening to feedback and ideas.
- Ask Questions. Before you’re done with a meeting or a conference, ask if there are any questions. This helps ensure the information you wanted to get across was conveyed accurately and helps with overall team engagement.
- Build team involvement. Making your team accountable is a good start, but make them part of the process to define the goals. This helps them buy into work, gives them ownership, and makes them fully aware of what they’re accountable for.
Respect Workers’ Autonomy.
If you micromanage every nanosecond of your team members’ day, you’re not helping their productivity. You’re certainly not creating a happy workplace. That doesn’t mean you give workers free rein; you are their manager, after all. However, you do want to instill mutual respect, which involves giving your team autonomy to manage their time.
One of the biggest culprits of time wasting is the internet. With the web just waiting behind that spreadsheet, it’s a big temptation to check Facebook or your favorite blog, and as I said, a prohibitive climate is not productive. Micromanagement may be more detrimental to productivity than a few idle moments online.
What do you do to encourage productivity without laying down Draconian laws?
- Set success metrics. If you have clear milestones that each team member is responsible for achieving within a specific scheduled time, you’re saying you trust them to accomplish this task on deadline the way they know best. If they need to take a break and watch a cat video, that’s okay.
- Offer incentives. Everyone likes to have their excellent work recognized, so provide the team members who go above and beyond to complete their work on time with some gift. It can be as simple as buying them lunch or giving out monthly gift certificates to top performers. When you make the incentives fun, it helps build a happy team culture, too. Be fair and include everyone- not just the favored few.
- Offer flexible working hours. Though you may need your team together during specific periods of the day, the time of day is less important than meeting the deadline. Also, some people work best in the morning, while others are more suited for later hours. If you can afford the flexibility, then allow your teams to work when they work best.
- Offer training opportunities. Complacency is dangerous for both you and your team. You want to encourage and keep them updated on new tools and techniques. Again, that investment will be rewarded by loyalty, trust, and improved productivity.
It’s not just today’s project and productivity goals that you should be focusing on. There’s always another project down the line, even though it can be challenging to see the forest when you’re in the weeds of a particular job. Future projects need to be kept in the back of the minds of everyone in the company.
If you burn out your workforce, you’ll have to undergo arduous team building all over again. It is not only hard work to find and train a new worker but expensive as well. The Corporate Executive Board has researched the cost of replacing a departing employee and found it can be as much as 150% of their salary to replace them if you consider lost productivity, recruitment fees, and training. Therefore, it’s crucial to get the job done today and cultivate a workplace that retains its workers.
There are many ways that companies and managers have made their organizations more attractive to their teams. Some of them are:
- Offer wellness benefits. Suppose you can provide employees with perks such as gym membership, a massage therapist who visits the office, healthy meals and snacks, and even mindfulness meditation breaks. In that case, you reduce work stress and create a happy work culture.
- Offer financial incentives. Money is the universal language. While team members may never be fully loyal to a company, they will respond positively to rewarding their hard work with cash incentives. Whether a bonus or other financial benefit, it’s a worthwhile perk to put into the budget.
- Extend paid leave options. It may seem counterintuitive to retain employees by allowing them to take an extended absence from the office, but it will pay off in the long run. Whether it’s personal days to attend family events, a paid vacation, or a sabbatical, these breaks from the daily grind allow people to regenerate and return to the job refreshed and ready to hit the ground running.
- Be a happy role model. As a manager, you cannot always be burning the midnight oil and telling your workers to go home and take it easy. This doesn’t mean slacking, but you want to exhibit the balanced behaviors you expect to see in your team and also work on your happiness to be an effective model.
- Set boundaries. With smartphones, emails, texts, and all the other new technologies and apps to keep people connected, it can feel as if work never ends. While it’s great that you and your workers have a modern means of communication, you need to respect their privacy and have specific times when they’re working and when they’re not.
In Conclusion
That’s it. Easy, right? No. Of course, it’s challenging to be happy and more complicated to promote a happy team culture, especially within a large organization. Think of happiness as another line item on your budget. You have to invest in getting the return. Give it the due diligence that the current research (and Google) has proven, try out these tips, and see what results in you get.
