The happier your employees are, the more productive their working day will be, and the more efficient their output.  An integral element of a happy working life, for both you and your workers, is to cultivate a positive and trustworthy workplace culture and here’s how to do it. 

Improve Your Leadership Skills 

You can’t possibly expect your employees to develop trustworthy working bonds within different departments if you, as the manager, don’t practice what you preach. 

Work on your ability to lead with honesty and integrity, by praising excellent work, and providing in-depth constructive criticism as a way of improving sub-par performances. 

Effective ways to be a better leader and an inspirational manager include:

• Setting ambitious yet realistic targets 
• Learning how to motivate your employees on a more personal level
• Practicing active listening
• Cultivating a deeper level of self-awareness
• Trying to stick to your decisions and taking ownership of the consequences 

Seek to Reduce Employee Turnover 

When a new hire comes aboard your company ship, imagine how disheartening it would be to learn that, far from the colleagues showing them the ropes in the first few weeks having been there for years, instead, they only joined the company recently, too.

Employee turnover, that is, the proportion of workers who leave your company within a set period of time, can cost a considerable amount of money to the business and even more crucially, take up your valuable time, which could alternatively be spent on other business needs.

Not only will improving your company’s prowess at dealing with employee absence management result in less associated expenses with new hires and onboarding costs, but the longer talented employees stay, the more teamwork and team spirit will be injected into the workplace. 

Prioritize Regular Check-Ins

As the manager, you’ll be able to reflect on more than a couple of times where, when hearing of an impending audit, you instruct everyone to make sure that everything is as it should be and that corners aren’t being cut. 

This urgency and sense of importance you and the business as a whole places on audits and other official inspections, in an effort to improve the workplace culture, should be apply just as often when it comes to checking in with your employees.

Acknowledgement of a job well done, alongside appreciation and respect, are three elements that make an excellent manager and leader, all of which cost absolutely nothing, take very little time to express, and crucially, vastly improve employee satisfaction levels.

Alongside more regular and in-depth check-ins, the following additional methods of improving employee satisfaction should also help:

• Actually listen to what your employees are saying and also try and act on it
• Be crystal clear when you give feedback (both positive and negative)
• Consider implementing remote and hybrid working options 
• Install a workplace intranet so employees can connect with each other online
• Offer incentives and rewards for hitting and exceeding targets

Positively Transform the Onboarding Process

First impressions count, and as much as this applies to the impression that any potential candidates show in an interview, it also applies to the feel of the workplace and your company itself, too. 

This is why either hiring an HR professional to streamline your hiring and onboarding process, or else choosing to dedicate your own time and energy to transforming the experience for new recruits, reflects a great deal of who you are as a business.

There’s also some debate, of late, around the subject of a more humane hiring process, especially in more conventional workspaces such as offices, which could be achieved by:

• Taking the time to provide honest feedback to unsuccessful candidates 
• Making sure the job description is both accurate and detailed
• Never expecting new recruits to constantly make the coffee and make copies
• Coming through with your promises and sticking to deadlines during the process 

Make the Workspace Comfortable & Relaxed 

Understandably, if your current workplace setup consists of a large number of private, grey-colored bays which aren’t in the slightest way personalized or otherwise customized to individual employees’ tastes, then you’re already doing something majorly wrong. 

Perhaps you could contact local dealers in office furniture and arrange a deal on a bulk order or new, comfortable, and ergonomic chairs and desks for your workers? Or the next time you’re enjoying a day in a garden center or even a hardware store, grab a selection of easy-to-maintain and aesthetically pleasing plants and flowers to position around the office and include some of these plants on work desks and in the staff room.