For entrepreneurs, productivity isn’t just a metric, but a necessary mindset in the company culture. But how do you motivate employees into happy and excited brand ambassadors for your brand?
There are many ways to keep your employees feeling wanted, loved, and encouraged daily. In today’s article , we review 15 tips you can integrate in your company culture to build a motivated and happy team.
1. Budget for books/Library
Books are not very expensive, and they can always be shared. Creating a budget for various books from storytellers to entrepreneurship and productivity books will not break your company’s budget. Books encourage a reading culture in your employees. People who read more learn more and improve their knowledge base and productivity.
Build a library where your team can get whatever book they haven’t read if they need to cool off, or have a new experience. Also, by encouraging employees to create reading lists and share them, you solidify your company’s reading culture. New employees can also be cultivated into this culture once they join the company.
2. Stock up on beer and hard liquor
Having a liquor cabinet at work encourages team bonding. It provides an atmosphere where employees can relax and unwind after a long day at work. Your employees can relax, brainstorm work ideas, and build stronger relationships.
Stocking up on beer shows an appreciation of work-life balance on the part of the employer. It shows you value relaxation and employees’ personal time, which leads to job satisfaction and morale. Share a toast with your employees to celebrate achievements or milestones. This helps to boost their morale and reinforce a positive work culture.
3. Workshops & webinars
Workshops are good for your employees as are webinars. Collaborating with your human resource department ensures employees implement what they learn to achieve the company’s goals. The idea of being outside the workplace for a workshop also excites a lot of employees.
4. Workplace makeover
Any easy way to do your workplace makeover when you have money is to upgrade the furniture that your employees use. You can also redesign your office into a better working place. Statistics show that improving your office’s design raises employee productivity by 17%. When your startup isn’t on a big budget, allowing employees to personalize their work desks will increase their productivity by 32%. This allows them to put pictures of their loved ones on their desks and put up a wall full of tasks to accomplish or even carry their favorite art sculpture to their desks in the office. Other startups have a ‘Pimp My Desk’ Day where employees compete for a gift card for the best DIY style.
5. Build a Fun and Creative Workplace
You could design a very creative office space for your employees especially if it’s meant to be an open-plan office. Instead of lumping your employees together in the open-plan office, find creative designers will design a space that stimulates your employees for the better. Add some fun into your office by having a dartboard or chalkboard where people write their ideas or go to brainstorm when they are tired from sitting on their computers all day.
6. Reward initiative
Founders start companies providing the core product, and while that is a huge achievement, the most successful companies today don’t depend on that one idea from the founder to survive. As the founder, you should encourage creativity in the company. Your employees can come up with several ideas to improve the core product. Listen to these ideas. The best companies in the world today are built on the foundation of listening to employees. Reward the best ideas and incorporate them into the core product to see how they affect the company’s main business.
7. A getaway game room
Incorporate a gaming room in your office where employees can escape to pass some time. Incorporating games like table tennis in there can give employees something to relax their minds when they need to. Just make sure to design tufted walls as acoustic shields to prevent the noise from spilling into the rest of the office space where a lot of concentration is ongoing. A video gaming center can also be incorporated especially if most of your employees are coders and developers.
8. Provide seat alternatives
From bag chairs to stools and standing workstations, choose from a variety of seat alternatives you can provide in your company. Don’t do the basic “office chair with lumbar support” thing. Be different. Most employees don’t like conventional company seats anyway. Provide standard office chairs, then spice them up with Ekornes recliner chairs and standing workstations.
9. Clear communication
Communication can make or break your startup. Be sure to communicate your company’s goals to your team, and give them time to process these and ask questions. Give them at least 3 hours to process the information and come back with questions if they may have any. Clear communication improves a workplace and ensures things run smoothly creating a win-win situation for everyone.
10. Invest in Training
Having versatile employees improves the overall productivity of the company. This should not translate into a “Jack of All Trades” situation. Training your employees in skills they are not good at will make them better people overall.
For example, there may be staff interested in mastering Spanish with Lingoda or a similar app. Some may be yearning for the company’s support in brushing up on their German or French language skills.
When you have software developers in your company, they may not be as good at using applications like MS Excel, or PowerPoint. However, online training platforms like Udemy or Coursera can come in handy here. Your developers can learn how to record data using Excel before presenting it to you using MS PowerPoint. When employees see you investing in their learning of side skills that improve their core skills, it encourages them to produce better results for the company.
11. Smart Delegation of Tasks
Delegation of tasks can get tasks completed faster. However, if done wrong it will lead to demoralized or overworked employees. Smart delegation involves studying your employees’ strengths and weaknesses before assigning tasks to them. This ensures that each employee gets the tasks in fields they are good at. That’s a balanced situation. The wrong scenario would be where the most hardworking employees are given all tasks to complete while other employees have more free time or get fewer tasks to complete. The result is hardworking employees who are fatigued and other employees who feel demoralized because they are underutilized.
12. Team Building Activities
Team building leads to the creation of personal bonds between employees. The team also gets to learn more about each other. These activities don’t necessarily have to be outdoor even though outdoor events are more encouraged or preferred when your budget allows. For example, a picnic or scenic hiking can be impactful, offering an escape while still fostering collaboration. Alternatively, if you’re seeking a more refined experience, you could embark on a luxury cruise or even explore Tanzania’s wildlife together, combining adventure with relaxation to strengthen bonds in an unforgettable setting. You can have team-building indoor events where you take time off the office work to play games or share drinks. This fosters better relationships at work, shares love, and leads to happier employees whose morale is out of the roof.
13. Have Smaller Teams
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO believes in small teams. Research has also proved that in bigger teams, individuals feel less responsible for anything than in smaller teams. Smaller teams will lead to higher productivity rates and quality work.
14. Project Management Tools in Place of Meetings
Instead of having endless meetings to check where your team has reached on their tasks, project management tools like Trello, Basecamp, and Asana can help you collaborate effectively with team members. There is also project management software for accounting firms like Financial Cents and Karbon that enable your team to remotely update their progress on various projects without wasting time with meetings. Research has shown that meetings and conference calls waste 5.6 hours of each employee’s time and reduce overall productivity. People don’t want to sit in meetings unless it’s necessary for them. Technology and platforms like Basecamp have made it possible to eliminate that productivity bottleneck.
15. Productive and Meaningful Feedback
The best projects are completed based on productive, honest, and meaningful back-and-forth feedback. Offer feedback when your employees bring the completed tasks to you for checking. Providing meaningful feedback to your employees shows that you are honest and increases the overall outlook of the administration. It will also create a culture of trust and personal growth so your team takes pride in improving their performance.
A productive and happier startup team can also come from press coverage of your project or brand. To achieve press coverage, send out a press release, design a media kit for journalists, and do email outreach. Pressfarm’s PR packages are designed for startups who want to achieve media coverage on a small budget. Reach out to us today.
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