Generally, it seems like competitive salaries and regular salary hikes are enough to ensure employee retention and satisfaction. However, there are several other factors that play an important role in ensuring employee happiness, engagement, and productivity.

Keeping employees happy, engaged, and productive is essential to ensure long-term success and reduce employee turnover rates. However, organizations often struggle to ensure that their teams are happy and engaged. In this article, we will discuss ways to keep employees happy, engaged, and productive to help organizations achieve maximum employee engagement, productivity, and happiness. Let’s begin.

  1. Prioritize Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is a key determiner of a healthy work environment. It is important for organizations to ensure that their employees have a positive work experience that is a part of a rich and fulfilling life. Maintaining a healthy work-life balance helps to reduce stress and avoid frequent burnout in the workplace. This helps employees to feel more connected to the organization and creates a positive work environment that makes them more happy and productive.

  1. Offer Growth Opportunities

According to Forbes, 56% of employees consider growth opportunities more important than the salary package. Along with offering a competitive salary, it is important for organizations to ensure that they are offering opportunities for growth to their employees.

There are several ways companies can provide growth opportunities to their employees:

  • An online library full of resources for employees to explore
  • Regular growth-oriented training sessions on new concepts
  • Pay for offsite skill development classes

Offering their team a chance to grow in whichever form they can help organizations to create a more focused, highly productive, highly-skilled, loyal, and high-morale driven workforce.

  1. Develop a Strong Corporate Culture

A great corporate culture attracts and retains employees. While deciding to leave a job, candidates tend to evaluate the company’s work culture to see if it aligns with their purpose and personal values. The presence of a positive work environment is also a significant contributing factor to their decision. If employees feel burnt out at work and witness a loss of morale in their team, it proves that the organization has a weak work culture.

According to a study by Hibob, 77% of employees feel that a strong corporate culture is extremely important. It helps organizations to prevent a fast turnover and ensures employee satisfaction. Even though every company has a different approach towards building their corporate culture, implementing these three strategies can help leaders to build a really strong and great corporate culture:

  • Focus on employee’s well-being
  • Lead by example and take mindful steps to avoid leadership hypocrisy
  • Clarify and communicate

A positive work environment that is part of a strong corporate culture can help organizations to keep their workforce happy, engaged, and productive very efficiently.

  1. Create Psychological Safety

It is exceptionally important for organizations to ensure that their work environment is a psychologically safe haven for their employees. There are several practices that can make employees feel psychologically distressed in the workplace, such as:

  • Often shutting down ideas
  • Belittling employees for making tiny mistakes
  • Punishing employees for doing something slightly wrong
  • Threatening them to not take risks
  • Subjecting them to unkind words
  • Judging or ridiculing them in case of disagreements, etc.

All these management approaches are wrong and can prove to be highly unprofitable for organizations. These approaches create a very unhealthy work environment that drives employees to be unhappy, unproductive, unmotivated, bored, and psychologically distressed. Hence, it is important that leaders undertake management approaches that don’t have a negative impact on their employees’ psychological health, such as:

  • Being kind towards their employees
  • Communicating often to discuss issues
  • Choosing a more kind and understanding tone while disagreeing with employees
  • Providing valid explanations for rejecting an idea instead of blatantly shutting them down
  • Providing more constructive and insightful criticisms instead of belittling and ridiculing them for their mistakes
  • Entertaining questions and concerns appropriately
  • Allowing them to speak freely without worrying about any judgment
  • Appreciating their efforts

By creating psychological safety for employees, organizations can ensure that their workforce is satisfied and happy. When employees feel heard and understand that both their concerns and suggestions are taken into valid consideration without being just brushed off, they tend to be more engaged and productive. Hence, empowering their employees with psychological safety can be a fruitful approach for organizations to ensure that their workforce is happy, engaged and productive.

  1. Allow Flexible Schedules

Allowing flexible schedules reduces work stress majorly in employees. Flexible schedules can include remote working days, telecommuting, flexible work hours, flexible breaks, etc. By being understanding and flexible, leaders can ensure that their team is happy and does not feel overburdened.

  1. Organize Fun Activities

Organizing fun activities like celebrations, get-togethers, group outings, game nights, bring-your-pet-to-work days, etc., can help organizations to boost communication among their employees and create a comfortable work environment for them. It can also enhance engagement and positivity in the workplace. Also, it offers teams a break from monotonous schedules and prevents frequent burnouts.

Keeping employees engaged, productive, and happy is a crucial task. However, it can prove to be highly demanding as well. Organizations need to ensure that they take the right steps so that it benefits them as well as their employees in the long run. By carefully implementing well-structured strategies, organizations can easily create a highly productive, engaged, and happy workforce.