Keeping an Employee Happy in 6 Easy Ways (No Wage Raise)
Entrepreneurs think that only a raise can make an employee happy, but this is far from the truth. It’s obvious if you look at the countless cases where people make a lot of money yet feel miserable about their jobs. Workplace happiness depends on many other aspects besides money. Discover these below:
- Make it matter and show it
It feels like your work is in vain if you don’t see it making a difference or if no one tells you how it helped. Employers must thus focus on showing the difference their workers make, since each of them has a role and a contribution to the profit. This can be done in many ways, the simplest being simply telling each team member about their contribution to success. Verbal recognition can be effective enough.
- Reward your employees
A regular salary isn’t enough – it’s predictable and thus it does not boost one’s motivation. Instead, if you choose to offer unexpected bonuses, gifts or rewards, the workers get a serious rush of dopamine. They greatly enjoy the surprise and try to repeat the good performance, in order to have another reward of the kind as soon as possible. It feels great. If your budget is small, then you can resort to giving them more free time, for example. Employee rewards programs are there to help you with this endeavour.
- Be transparent
Managers and all sorts of leaders must exercise transparency; it’s what earns people’s trust and gives them a better perspective. You must be clear on the course of action, the end goals, the state of the business and its competition and so on. Let your subordinates know what is happening and what you have envisioned or what you’re expecting to get out of their work.
- Respect their personal time on a daily basis
You may want workers to be there for long hours at least until the big current project is over, but that will wear them out. It’s better in the long run to just give them the daily needed time for rest. This keeps them motivated and productive instead of tired, angry and frustrated.
- Create common areas
Socialisation is important in every work place. One of its most important effects is that of relieving stress and of strengthening teams. A workplace should have at least one common area for employees to gather and share thoughts. Do not steer communication in any direction – it needs to be free and uncensored. Free talk is much better than just having discussions only about the work and the tasks at hand.
- Enable common breaks
Some employers mistakenly believe that by giving free time whenever, they keep the staff happy. However, this often means that while someone is out of the office, others will work to keep the operations going. The best policy is to offer common breaks, so that employees can get together and socialise instead of having individual breaks and being lonesome.
Business owners in the pursuit of employee happiness are required to pay more attention to the psychological needs and the emotional well-being of workers in order to ensure happiness and productivity. This usually requires no investment at all and the solutions are easy to implement.
