There’s only so much you can provide to your employees in order to make them more efficient from the technical standpoint. Past that point, it all comes down to motivation which, in great part, depends on the workplace atmosphere. This means that you need to make sure that your employees actually can’t wait to get back to work tomorrow morning, instead of feeling like going back to prison every time they arrive to work. With that in mind, here are several hacks for a positive workplace environment that will give results the quickest.
1. Give people their freedom
What this means is that when you delegate tasks to someone, you need to make sure that you give them full freedom and show full trust to the person in question. In other words, they need to have the autonomy of making decisions for tasks that they’re performing and they need to have the freedom of knowing that there isn’t someone watching over their shoulder whether they’re doing a good job. This may seem risky, however, you don’t know what every individual’s work process is like, which is why you should trust the end result.
2. Match responsibility with the paycheck
Another thing you need to understand is the fact that money is an incredible motivator; in fact, it makes the majority of workforce’s primary motive for working in the first place. This is why people on a performance pay tend to be much less likely to complain about their workload, even in scenarios where they work twice as much as their fixed salary counterparts. When increasing the individual responsibilities of your employ, make sure to follow up with a necessary bonus or a raise. In this way, your staff will always look forward to a challenge.
3. A small token of gratitude
The reason why gifts are more efficient than bonuses is due to the fact that they’re A) not expected and B) the fact that they’re not really earned. Think about it: are you really grateful to someone who’s giving you something that you see as rightfully yours? Of course, this is not about your employees feeling grateful towards you but rather about them seeing that you’re ready to financially reward them even when you don’t really have to. Needless to say, it’s much more efficient to do this via an actual gift or a MasterCard gift card program, rather than through a direct cash payment, in order to differentiate from the bonus even further.
4. The customer is not always right
If you go by that old and outdated “customer is always right” rule, you’ll often find yourself in a scenario where you take the side against your own employees. This is true even when your employees are clearly in the right and the customer is clearly in the wrong. How do you think your team will feel about this in the long-run? Just consider it and try to make an estimate of whether it’s worth to ruin the internal unity of your team and your relationship with your staff in order to accommodate a single client. Probably not. This is why the customer is not always right.
5. Fire emotional vampires
At the end of the day, sometimes in order to help out your team, you need to downsize it a bit. You see, there are some employees who can make the workplace a living hell. The worst thing is that these people commonly end up making a solid individual performance, yet, it’s their effect on others that’s troublesome. By spreading negative energy, they’re reducing the overall morale in the office, metaphorically draining life from others, which is why these people are commonly referred to as emotional vampires.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, making a positive workplace environment doesn’t really take much in terms of resources and effort. Moreover, you need to understand that any resource commitment that you make here is mandatory, even though some of these expenses may seem optional.