Happy Employees Are the Secret to Success

Proledge

April 3, 2013

Best Practices

The jobs site CareerBliss.com analyzes 50,000 company reviews and evaluations it receives each year from employees. The most content workers in the U.S. credit their happiness to first-rate employee incentives, ample benefits, career advancement programs, and great work-life balance.

Happy employees save companies money, provide excellent customer service, make fewer mistakes and work more efficiently. What are you doing to create a happy work environment for your employees?

Here are a few ideas to keep your team in high spirits and your profit margins growing:

1. Pay your employees accurately and on-time. Every time.

Create staffing worksheets to inform full and part-time employees and managers alike who will be working each day of the week. This worksheet offers a visual of the staffing levels you are creating and ensures you have the proper workforce allocation at all times.

It also provides benefits to your bookkeeper during monthly payroll as it creates an easy and accurate account of each worker’s hours. Accounting for full-time and part-time workers in the same way can make it easier for you to tally up individual paychecks at the end of the week. In addition, this kind of accounting can help you understand what your payroll costs will be over the course of a quarter or the fiscal year.

2. Happy employees stay put and save money.

Hiring and training new employees is expensive and time-consuming. Unless an employee is incompetent and a liability to the company, your best bet is to keep the one’s you’ve got! Highly skilled and educated employees will look for work elsewhere if they don’t feel supported and appreciated by their managers. Know your employees, know what makes them happy and give it to them. If you promise someone a pay raise – deliver. If you promise training and/or resources to make someone’s job more efficient – deliver. If someone has been working above and beyond to accomplish a goal or meet a deadline, then perhaps reward them with a long weekend and a gift card to a nice restaurant at the conclusion of the project. If an entire department accomplishes a corporate goal, you might give them extra days off around the holiday of their choice. Get creative! The key is to acknowledge and reward the hard work and dedication of your employees and they will continue to deliver their best work for you.

3. Listen to your employees.

It’s important to check in with employees and get their feedback on business processes, new initiatives, customer interactions, etc. By giving employees a voice and making them feel heard you create a collaborative environment where happiness and profits can soar. Check in monthly or quarterly with your team members and have an open-door policy where fresh ideas and suggestions are encouraged.

The benefits to happy employees are endless: they create a pleasant work environment, perform better as a team, are more creative, more motivated, they miss less work, make better decisions and fewer mistakes, are solution-oriented and have better relationships with management. All of these things contribute to the success of your company, as well as, the lives of the people working for you. That should be the ultimate reward for any business owner.

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