As a business owner in the modern age, it is essential that you look at how you can get more out of your employees. One of the best ways to do this is to look at what you can do to take better care of them. The fact of the matter is that you want to build a positive environment and a pleasant place for people to want to work. This will increase the chances of employee satisfaction and productivity. It will also reduce staff turnover, which saves you money in advertising, recruitment and training costs.
Make sure you do everything you can to look after your employees and give them a reason to want to stay in the business. Now, there are many ways you can do this, and this is very important as a business owner. Here are some of the ways in which you can take care of your staff a little bit better this year.
Provide them with a uniform
A uniform fosters a sense of community and belonging. If everyone is wearing a uniform, it will have multiple positive effects on your business. For starters, it looks more professional, and any customers or clients will recognize an employee. Secondly, your staff won’t have to get up every morning and hunt around for an appropriate outfit to wear or risk ruining their own clothes. A uniform does not have to be fancy or expensive – smart black pants and a t-shirt or sweater with patches on thepinfactory.com.au to identify your business is all you need.
Provide them with a safe environment
It is essential that your staff come to work and feel safe in their environment, both in the physical sense and emotionally. This means making sure that your workspace adheres to all mandatory health and safety requirements and activities and workspaces are regularly risk-assessed to make sure nothing has changed and needs reorganizing. This also has benefits for you as an employer – the last thing you want is a member of staff or a visitor to get injured and land you with a hefty bill and legal fight on your hands!
You also want them to feel safe emotionally. Keep an eye out for any tension or conflict between team members and stamp out any workplace bullying at the very first sign of it. Have an open-door policy, where your staff can feel safe and comfortable coming to talk to you about any problems that they have without the fear of recriminations.
Do not micromanage
While a good employer manages his or her staff, they do not micromanage. Make sure you only take on staff that you can trust to do the job properly without you breathing down their necks all the time. Continually being on their backs and managing every tiny thing can have a significantly detrimental effect on both productivity and staff morale. Take a step back and trust that they are doing what you hired them to do.
Give them a space to wind down
If you give your staff a clean, comfortable and pleasant space to spend their break times, they will come back to work feeling refreshed and productive. Again, this does not need to be anything too fancy – somewhere to sit and relax and somewhere to sit and eat their food, preferably with facilities to store and heat up food. As well as that, clean toilets is essential!
Team building activities
We spend a lot of time at work, and so it is important that we get on with the people that we work with. Arrange some team building and social activities to really help your team gel and get to know one another better. Stay away from anything too cheesy and cringe-inducing, but an activity day or even a meal and drinks at a restaurant or bar can help foster good working relationships amongst employees.
Listen to them
One of the best things that you can do is to listen to your employees. As we said above, having an open-door policy where they can come to you with any issues is one of the first and more important things to have in place. However, you could also have meetings or suggestion boxes where they can suggest changes or new ways of doing something – and if they are reasonable, implement them! After all, they are the ones doing the groundwork; they are the ones best qualified to say what is working and what is not working!
Looking after your staff means a more productive workforce, a more loyal workforce and better results for you as a business owner.
