How to keep your employees happy
Want to run a productive, profitable and long-lasting business? Then you need to keep your employees happy! Read for three of the best ways to do so.
Your employees are perhaps the most important element of your business to take care of. After all, if they’re happy and productive, your customers will be served, the work will be done efficiently, and the team will generally be a lot more interested in working hard for the good of the company.
Unhappy employees, on the other hand, won’t care about customers or the business, and they’ll only do the bare minimum they have to in order to get paid. That’s not a good look for your business, especially if customers don’t like how they’re treated and look elsewhere to spend their money.
The good news is there are plenty of ways you can keep your employees happy, and if you concentrate on that task, everything else should fall into place. With that in mind, here are three of the best ways to make your employees glad they’re working for you.
1) Train them
When you hire someone, do you look for a lot of experience, or do you want someone who is keen to learn? It’s really going to depend on the ethos of your business to some extent, and, of course, it’s going to depend on money. But no matter what type of employee you recruit, there’s always going to be some training involved, and making sure they get that training is one way to keep them happy.
It’s obvious that a new starter with little to no experience is going to need training; that makes sense. But what about those who’ve been working in the industry for years? Do they really need you to spend time and money on them to train them in something they already know how to do (and was the reason you hired them in the first place)?
Well, the truth is that they’ll need training too – they’ve never worked in your specific business before, so they’ll need to know how you do things to ensure they’re are productive and safe as possible. When you show that you want to take care of your team by keeping them up-to-date and trained, they’ll be a lot happier to work for you.
2) Give them what they need
All the training in the world isn’t going to make up for the fact that if an employee doesn’t have the equipment and resources they need to do their job, they’re not going to be happy.
In fact, it might even make the situation worse; imagine having a job where you’re told how something should be done only to find you can’t do that thing (or you can’t do it in the way you’ve just been trained to) because you don’t have the tools you need to do it. It would be miserable, and you’d be keen to quit in most cases.
So don’t do that to your team, and make sure you give them what they need. If you’re not sure what that is, ask – your team will let you know what’s missing or what needs to be improved. It might be they want a trade account at DIY Building Supplies, for example, or perhaps it’s a piece of software that would make all the difference. Ask them what they need and deliver on your promises, and it will make a world of difference to how happy everyone is and how much work they can get done.
3) Pay them fairly
Money is always going to be an issue because it’s something everyone needs, and not having enough can cause massive problems, not just in terms of your credit score and finances, but in terms of your health too.
If someone’s in a job that doesn’t pay them what they’re worth, then you might just wonder why they don’t look for another job, but it’s not always as easy as that – jobs aren’t always easy to find, and for many it’s better to earn something, even if it’s not what they need to get by.
However, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, an underpaid worker will leave, and in the meantime, they’re not going to work as hard as they could; why should they if they’re not getting paid enough and it’s causing them problems?
Before you decide on a salary for a worker, do some research to ensure you’re not paying too little. You can take experience into account, of course, and different roles will have different salaries, but if you want happy workers, you need to pay them fairly, so this research is crucial.
