Every business owner wants to push the envelope and do better. To make their business more successful and really push the sales and customer confidence. Whether a local corner shop or a multinational conglomerate, this is always the way. Expand, do better, make more money. It’s been hard to do this over the last few months, at least for those businesses who aren’t based completely online. Building customer trust can be tough during these times. But one thing has and will always ring true, if your employees are thriving, your business will too. Each organisation uses different ways to try and ensure their employees are working to their best. That each employee has a reason to increase productivity, and take pride in their work. This stretches across all different kinds of industries and businesses. There may be specific ways to do it unique to certain industries but taking note of a wide range of methods to ensure your employees thrive is a sure way to put together your own package of ideas. Everything’s worth considering. These tips can help you shift your perspective, and to ensure your employees, like yourself, are driving your business only in the right direction. With an economic downturn on the horizon and a potential recession, this has never been more important.
Employee Safety
Employees won’t be able to work well if they don’t feel like they’re safe. These concerns can come from different places depending on the industry. If they work in a manufacturing plant they’re going to want to ensure proper machinery is being used which is often inspected for faults. If you work with ice, or liquid, there needs to be proper safety measures in place like a Swiftdrain, and the correct non slip footwear to work in wet conditions. Provide the right personal protective equipment to ensure they can do their work without having to worry about anything bad happening. This extends to mainstream offices and generic places of work. If you’ve got fossil fuel burning items, a carbon monoxide alarm. Use a fire alarm at all times too. Make sure you have fire drills regularly enough for people to know what to do. When new people start, go through everything with them properly. Staff who are secure are people who can focus completely on their work instead of having to worry about safety. This is even more important at the moment with Covid-19. If people are coming back to work soon, make sure social distancing is maintained at all times. Try to give everyone masks if you can too.
Training
People aren’t going to be able to excel and succeed if they don’t have the grounding to do so. You need to make sure people on your work force are trained to the relevant standard. If they aren’t, it’s not fair to hold them to account. You might have various training procedures in place to ensure the correct kind of output from your employees, but revisit and ensure it works well enough to succeed long term, especially if you’re planning on recruiting more people down the line. The training can be delivered by yourself, but if you have the money and don’t necessarily have the time you could delegate to someone else you trust. If it’s training in a specific system or work process which isn’t bespoke to your business, you could enlist the help of a training company to do it for you. There are often different ones of these out there and it’ll be for you to find one which you think will be able to do a good job. It’s all about the time trade off for yourself. If your time is better spent elsewhere which will garner more value, go with getting someone else to do it for you.
Achievable Targets
If you want to set your workforce targets, which they need to hit on a weekly or monthly basis, then you need to ensure they’re fair and achievable. Otherwise you’ll only annoy people, and they’ll grumble about things being unfair. If they’re achievable then people will strive to hit them and even go beyond. There might be some trial and error in ensuring things run smoothly and that you’ve got the targets right. This is why it might be important to include your work force in the decision making. A workforce who are involved in key decision making processes, especially ones swatch directly affect them, will go down far better than those which are not.
Away Days
Taking time away from work can be a great way to motivate your workforce and to see them thrive. It allows you to spend time with them, and them with each other, outside the usual work environment. They can get to know each other a little better, while also ensuring that any issues or kinks are ironed out. These are usually reserved for a team building exercise, but you can just go and have some fun. The trick is to get people talking to each other and to ensure relationships are built and the foundations built upon. These are especially useful if you manage to hire lots of people at the same time. A couple of weeks into their training, this is a great way to blow off some steam. If you don’t want to front the cost, you can run something like this from your main workspace, or pay a company to do it all for you.
Work Flexibility
Flexibility is becoming increasingly common in the workplace, and rightly so. If you offer flexibility then your employees will be far more productive. This means allowing them to start work when they want (if not customer facing), meaning as long as they make up their hours over the week they can start and finish when they please. This is extremely popular with people who have caring or childcare issues. Also, some people work better at different parts of the day. You might also want to ensure your workforce works from laptops instead of desktops, if an office based business. This allows people to work from home. Working from home allows people to pay less for commuting, and to work in a productive and comfortable environment. You can allow this a few days a week so long as it works. A benefit of this is that if there is an issue with your place of work, people can work from home instead of having the day off. If someone’s ill they may be able to work from home comfortably, whereas otherwise they would have been off. If something terrible like coronavirus happens again you know your staff can still work comfortably from home.
Break Room
Your employees need somewhere to get away from the office when at work. Somewhere to unwind on their break or to eat their lunch. Getting away from the work environment is important because it allows them to switch off, and come back in with a fresh mind ready for work. Everyone is different, and they’ll all need different kinds of break. Some might not want any at all and want to work through. The break room should be comfortable. There should be cooking facilities there for people to make food. You might want to think about including some kind of entertainment too. This is usually a television or perhaps some kind of games table. The decor should be different compared to the main workplace. You can consult your staff about this, they’ll enjoy being part of the decision, especially as it directly impacts them.
