If you want to boost morale, increase productivity, and reduce turnover, you need to focus on the happiness of your employees. Small changes in your workplace environment and company culture can make a significant difference.
In this article, we'll provide five tips for enhancing employee happiness and creating a more engaged and loyal workforce.
In this blog post, you'll learn the following:
- How recognizing and rewarding hard work can improve employee satisfaction.
- Why it's a win-win situation when you offer your employees opportunities for growth.
- How employee benefits can increase employee retention and add to a happy workplace.
Despite offering competitive salaries, many organizations overlook a crucial aspect that drives employee loyalty and business success: workplace happiness. Research by Zipdo found that job satisfaction boosts the likelihood of long-term commitment to an organization by 50%.
If you want this positive impact on your organization, here are five ways you can keep your employees happy at work.
The first step to having happy employees is open communication. To build a sense of trust and connect on a more personal level, you should encourage transparent and open dialogue between employees and management.
You can do this through:
By putting these efforts into practice, you can help your employees feel heard and valued. Open communication also goes hand in hand with creating a supportive and inclusive workplace culture. To take your positive work environment to the next level, try hosting team-building activities and social events. You can also promote initiatives that prioritize employees' well-being.
Don't let your employees’ hard work go unnoticed. Implement rewards and recognition programs that celebrate their achievements and contributions to the organization.
You can acknowledge hard work through:
All of these can boost employee morale and motivation. It’s a surefire way to have happy employees who feel like their work has a direct impact.
Another way to keep your employees happy is to give them time to tend to their personal lives. According to Joblist2, 63% of employees are looking for a better work-life balance. In fact, Joblist research found that most employees believe it’s more important than a higher salary.
You can encourage your entire team to maintain a healthy balance between work and personal life by:
This helps reduce burnout, boosts employee engagement, and increases overall job satisfaction.
If you want to avoid having unhappy employees, you need to prevent them from feeling stuck or bored in their roles. This is why it's important to provide growth opportunities for employees to learn through training programs, workshops, and online courses. Supporting their career advancement and personal development not only enhances their skills but also demonstrates that your company values their professional growth.
Finally, if you want to keep your people happy, offer them the employee benefits they want. For example, health benefits consistently rank as the most-desired employee benefit. However, health benefits can also be the most costly to provide. But that's only the case if you're looking at traditional group health insurance.
Health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) are cost-effective solutions for health benefits. With an HRA, you offer your employees a tax-free allowance for them to spend on individual health insurance plan premiums and more than 200 other eligible medical expenses. This allows you to reimburse them for health coverage instead of buying it for them directly.
The most common types of HRAs include:
Remember, showing employees you care means going beyond the bare minimum. Along with offering health benefits, you should consider adding other desirable employee perks and benefits to your overall compensation package.
Our 2024 Employee Benefits Survey also found that employees also want:
Companies are constantly vying for top talent, which makes creating a positive culture more important than ever. Studies show that when you keep your employees happy, they're more motivated and committed to their work. This ultimately benefits your entire organization.
If you want a happy and healthy work environment for your employees, you need to offer them health benefits. PeopleKeep can help you offer an affordable HRA in minutes. Schedule a call with one of our HRA specialists to get started.
This post was originally published on October 9, 2014. It was last updated on September 18, 2024.