Tips to Keep your Employees Happy and Healthy  

The COVID-19 Pandemic has greatly shifted the work world, immediately hitting several office trends quickly. As a result, it is now more critical than ever to keep employees happy, healthy, and productive. Employee happiness is one of the essential factors in operating a profitable and successful company. Engaged and happy employees support company innovation, perform better, and miss less work, thus resulting in higher profits and lower turnover.

This begs the question, what tips can you take as a manager to keep your employees happy, healthy, and productive. Keep reading to learn more!

Keeping Employees Happy and Healthy
Handing out a promotion or raise is one option for keeping employees content, satisfied, and happy in their roles. However, there are many other cost-effective options to ensure your employees feel their best while working. These include:

Construct a Positive Work Environment
Constructing a positive work environment can be challenging, but it is now more important than ever to build a workplace that excites employees. Positive work environments are regularly the most desirable factor for workers in a variety of professional studies. While numerous factors participate in creating a positive environment, maintaining transparency and open dialogue is critical to ensuring employee issues don’t remain bottled up.

Develop Career Mobility
Employees require room for career mobility and growth to remain secure, productive, and positive. It is always difficult for an employee to feel like they are striving to reach a goal but have no way to advance in their career. In most instances, those striving for the next promotion, or a higher raise have that motivation. Those that do not feel like they don’t need to work harder because their job is not appreciated.

Listen to your Employees
Within many companies, the leaders make the decisions while employees hear about them after the fact without input. When major decisions are made that impact the workforce without employee input, workers feel forgotten and left out, which leads to unhappiness. When considering how to construct a positive work environment, ensure you listen to your employees and utilize their feedback.

Offer Flexible Working Schedules
A flexible working environment is the future of work. When employees feel like they have a lot of flexibility at work, they feel more freedom to balance their personal and professional lives. This level of comfort leads to greater productivity and happiness.

Prioritize Work-Life Balance
Employee work-life balance plays a key role in their workplace happiness. While work-life balance has become a buzzword because of the pandemic, it plays a critical role in all healthy work environments. Ensuring your employees have a great balance is critical to constructing a positive work environment and keeping everyone happy.

Recognize Employee’s Hard Work
Saying a simple “thank you” can go a long way toward keeping employees motivated. Managers often overlook the fact that recognition does not need to be in the form of a grandiose gesture. Instead, recognizing an employee’s success in completing a major project or reaching certain goals plays a considerable role in how the workplace is perceived.
When leadership praises their challenging work and recognizes the effort that went into the task, employees feel comforted. A few ideas to reward them include:

• Ask leadership to recognize employees for their work, regardless of the rank.
• Encourage managers to give positive feedback.
• Hand out prizes at corporate celebrations.
• Implement rewards for specific achievements.
• Utilize team meetings to recognize others on the team.

Many of these tips can be difficult to implement immediately. However, over time, developing a positive work environment, with career mobility and flexible working schedules, a prioritization of work-life balance, listening to your employees, and recognizing their arduous work will keep them motivated. Remember, a happy employee is a productive employee!