There’s a growing body of research indicating that happier employees are more productive and that more productive employees are happier.

In our evermore rapidly-changing business landscape, we business owners should take note, and foster happier employees – they’re good for our team, for us to work with, and for our bottom lines.

How Do We Measure What Happy Team Members Bring to Our Business?

Studies show that happier employees are:

• More engaged with their work and its attendant tasks and projects.
• More likely to being greater creativity and innovation to the table.
• Less likely to take sick leave (they’re healthier for being happy).
• More likely to stay with their employers, boosting the bedrock of experience, loyalty and institutional memory which can be invaluable to our businesses.
• More likely to communicate and work well with others.

Remember this: Happiness is contagious! Happier team members lead to happier team members!

And they can save us money:

• When our team members stay with us longer, they save us recruiting and training expenses for new hires, and we don’t lose the work time such training time takes away from meeting our clients’ needs.
• When people take less sick time, those are days we don’t lose their productivity. This can also make for savings on healthcare and health insurance.

So, how can we cultivate happiness within our teams and leverage the business advantages of their happiness?

It Starts at the Top

Whether our business is a place fostering happiness or one with a toxic culture starts with us—the business owners. As I’ve often said, “The fish stinks from the head.”

But we can cultivate fragrant roses instead of stinking seafood.

It takes mindful leadership – and requires us to cultivate our own happiness as we foster that of our team members.

How We Can Encourage Happiness

Today’s workers expect – demand – more than prior generations did. They consider fair pay, benefits, and time off essential. They want to feel they are valued, and that their work makes a difference – that what they do is not meaningless, paper-pushing drudgery.

And they want a well-balanced life – they value what happens at work, but they also value time and energy to spend on their families, friends, hobbies and pursuits.

So, what concrete (and prudent) steps can we take to nurture their happiness?

We can:

• Make sure we are both communicating that our employees’ happiness matters to us and showing this in our actions.
• Be available (at specific times or in blocks of time on specific days) to them – let them know we value their feedback and care about their concerns. But we mustn’t let this get in the way of our own productivity.
• Offer flexible hours – some of the best talents want to work fewer than 40 hours per week. Can we handle that? Let’s not say no without at least considering it as a possibility.
• Offer flexible work arrangements – more and more employees want to be able to work remotely at least some days in the week. Remote work isn’t going to go away – it’s going to grow, and we should grow in that direction, too, since the market is doing just that. Don’t let’s get left behind the curve (or the 8-ball!).
• Create opportunities for individual growth, via continuing education and training, and make sure positions have promotability when an employee has earned it.
• Acknowledge achievements – when a team member earns a new credential, solves a client’s problem, or devises a better internal process, celebrate that – in public. Make sure the whole team knows this is something we value. Post their accomplishments to social media (this is good for us, too, as it builds awareness of our teams, and a sense that we value people – this is never a bad look for business owners!). Give them a bonus if they’ve earned the firm more money than we expected.
• Hold team-building events regularly – monthly meetings, perhaps, or a group lunch we pay for and let them talk amongst themselves. The better they come to know one another, the more trust and camaraderie they will have, and the team will function better, individually and as a whole, for it.
• Take note, when we’re hiring new talent, of which candidates give off a sense of happiness. This can be an important factor to consider – because, again, happiness is contagious.

What to Avoid

We’ve identified some steps we can and should take. So, what shouldn’t we do?

Above all, let’s not overdo it. We can’t insist that our people be thrilled every minute of every day. Life doesn’t work that way and employees acting as if it does will be counterproductive.

They have lives, children, spouses, and aging parents who’ll get sick.

There will be clients who make them anxious (if this is a regular matter for a given client, we can consider firing that client, as keeping a stellar team member rather than a constantly griping client is often the better part of wisdom).

Give them space to be unhappy when it’s appropriate, and they’ll be readier to be happy when the problem is dealt with.

What strategies have you found to help your team be a happier one to work in?

Please click here to email me directly – since I take my team’s happiness (and their productivity) to heart, I’m always eager to learn from you!

Until next time –

Peace,

Eric