5 Tips To Increase Employee Happiness

“Never reply when you are angry, never make a decision when you are sad, never make a promise when you are happy”.

Humans are emotional beings. Infact, they are very emotional beings as it doesn’t matter how smart we are, we eventually end up taking decisions from our heart, even though we should take decisions from the mind. But, isn’t emotions the only thing that makes us different from other living beings?

Emotions are like a thick wall in front of our minds. And as mentioned, it is advised to not make promises when we are happy. But what does this mean?

A person is the most productive when he/she is happy. Happiness is directly linked to productivity. As we are happy, we are willing to do anything, as a boost to productivity or to make the person asking for the favour happy too. This works vice-versa too, imagine asking a favour to a person that is sad or angry, not a good idea, right?

Happiness can result in an increase of up to 12% in productivity, according to the study conducted by Economic researchers at the University of Warwick. Whereas the same study discovered that unhappy employees are 10% less productive. Significant positive improvements in productivity are caused by a happy employee, according to the research team. As a result, the happy team can keep the project according to the project baseline itself.

This theory is accepted by many leading companies and as a matter of fact, Amazon buying the company Zappos for a whopping 1.2 billion dollars is an example of this. Zappos was able to achieve such an environment in the office, that the employees felt happy and thus their productivity was boosting. Amazon realized this and bought the company as a case study or as a base to achieve the same environment.

Other than resulting as a boosting factor, happiness in the workplace is too important to keep the employee churn down and keep them away from stress. As an employee is unhappy, there will come a time where they want to be happy and to be so, changing the job is the best option as they cannot change the company’s environment so better change the company itself.

It was revealed by a government report in 2018-19 that stress accounted for 44% of all work-related ill health cases and 54% of all lost working days due to ill health. To top matters off, in 2018 it was reported that one in three UK employees are considering leaving their jobs because of the stress.

Happiness and client management are closely related as we humans transmit vibes. If an employee is happy, he/she can treat the client with happiness and transfer their happy energy that leads to a happy client. Therefore a happy employee leads to a happy client.

Here are some steps you can take to increase employee happiness:

1. Prioritise work-life balance:

We work to earn money, we earn money for ourselves and our family, so in short, we work for our family. So what if work is the thing that is coming between you and your family, we will not like it.

If you are stubborn about a certain hour on which the team has to come, be fixed about the time of leaving too. Whoever is in charge of the in-time of the members, should also take the responsibility that the members go on time too.

According to a survey, employees who feel they have a good work-life balance, work 21% harder.

Moreover, flexible timings are appreciated as the person is allowed to do the work when they can and want to. Work from home is the most appreciated one as the time wasted in commuting is gifted to the employees as an extra time to spend with family or friends.

2. Be prepared to listen and change:

Suppose you are doing a project and in the middle of the project execution you come across some task that is likely to have a bad impact on the deliverables, what you can do here is you can change the task or just delete it as you have the authority to do so.

But, when it comes to some rule or environment of the office, you are a mere employee and that is not in your hands. Now what you can do is wait till it gets changed or we can just leave. The manager can implement the necessary changes but he is not doing so either because he doesn’t want to or he just doesn't know anything about it.

Therefore, feedback or personal interaction should be done on a regular interval to ensure that the team is satisfied and happy.

3. Create a career pathway:

The basic human traits are never being satisfied with what we have and the inability of being stagnant. You can say that we have an insect inside us that never lets us be at one place and we just always want to move and grow.

This is what happens when it comes to our careers. We are working the hardest and we want to grow, when we see that we are not growing and are stuck, we cannot stay put now.

The simple solution here is establishing a career path for each of the employees so that they can grow in your organization itself and help you grow too. Help the employees figure out the steps in planning and achieving their career goals.

4. Encourage the members:

I am a big fan of “The Wolf of Wall Street ” and the best part of the movie was the meeting. It seemed like the employees worked there for the meeting only. The thing that Leonardo did in all those meetings was to encourage the team which in turn led to positivity.

Encouragement doesn’t mean that you burden the employees but to encourage them in positively so that you dig deep into them and release their true potential.

Moreover, to encourage them, you have to interact with them, which creates a relation between you and the members, so now if the members are facing any problem, they can tell you about it during the session.

5. Saying “Thank you”:

As a manager, you will understand the importance of project management to accomplish a project, but as you manage the team too you should know the importance of certain other things too and here I mean the importance of “Thank you.”

Consider positivity and happiness as twins and also note that small things have a big impact. Let me tell you about my recent incident:

I live in India and that too in Ahmedabad which is highly populated and traffic is just one of the things that we Ahmedavadis have to face daily. Everyone here is just in the most hurry to go as you can’t imagine. I was going home after a long day at my office and I was in a hurry too as I was too hungry. As I was going a lady crossed the road in such a way that I had no option but to let her go first. But, as she passed me, I saw her saying thank you. This small word brought so much positivity that I just let everyone cross me, which is not what I usually do. But I was so happy with the “Thank you” that I couldn’t help it.

So what I am trying to say is that unlike all the steps I mentioned, you can do small things to make your employees happy, which will, in turn, make them loyal to you and the company.

Conclusion:

We can be creative and work at our 100% only if we are happy with what we are doing. Therefore you should consider your organization as your family and as the leader of the family, it is your duty to ensure that every member is happy so that all of you grow together, which will ultimately lead to the growth of the organization.

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