If you find employees are working listlessly in the beginning of the New Year, instead of snapping at them to work hard you had better find out the real motivator to them. According to the latest employee enjoyment level survey conducted by RMG Selection, a positive and healthy working environment has become the primary factor that can guarantee employees’ enjoyment at work. There is no surprise that working atmosphere already outranked the position of benefits welfare and incentives in the fun factor list. In the Talent Flow Survey 2013 (TFS2), another annual talent report conducted by RMG, the importance of benefits and incentives are in the first place of employee’s consideration. Therefore, it is time for employers and HR managers to think about how to improve the fun side of work.
There are a lot of people talking about how to help employees have fun at work. It is so important to talk about fun at work is simply because most of us spend more than ten hours in the office. Based on the latest survey result, 31.6 percent of participants’ fun time at work is about two to four hours. To bring that to the next level, employers should specifically work on improving the working atmosphere. To achieve this, we must figure out what are specific work are included in improving working atmosphere. In this regard, I would like to share a few tips.
First of all, nothing is of enjoyment and satisfaction if it is in an awful mess. Imagine you are working in an office with filthy carpets, stripped wall skin, dusty window-blinds, withered plants and flowers, scattered files and paper on tables and chairs every day. Are you going to enjoy yourself in such an environment? The answer is obvious for most people. Everyone likes a clean and tidy working place. A bad physical working environment often exerts negative influence on employees’ mood work, which make it absolutely not fun to be at work. One of my favorite emails is the regular tidy day email from the administration. In my company, a biweekly office cleaning day is a whole company “event”. While sorting out documents and cleaning table, employees talk and laugh with one another. If they enjoy working for a tidy office, I do not see why you should not you plan and organize it?
The second suggestion on improving the company atmosphere is to ask each team leader to hold regular team lunches. Due to the different job content, not all employees in a team have quality time to talk and share opinions together. By organizing a weekly or bi-weekly team lunch, preferably set the time on Friday when everyone is a bit relaxed, team leaders can help enhance the chemistry among all team members. Atmosphere is not just about the physical working environment. The people who they work with matter, too. However, the concern to employers might be the cost, in fact I suggest employers not to make the team lunch a paid-by-company meal. It is alright to make it a go Dutch meal for employees. By suggesting privately to all team leaders that they can have better team work if they try regular team lunch, they will organize and summon team members for the sake of the team.
Another piece of advice is to take care of employees’ birthday. Birthday is a very important moment to every individual. There is not much real care for employees if the birthday celebration is only prepared for the big boss. It does not take ages to prepare for a birthday celebration. Send birthday wishes and order birthday cakes are both simple ways to help employees enjoy working in a company. In some companies, I heard employees are given some money or shopping coupons as birthday gifts from the company. Money can be a gift if the operation cost allows the company to do so, but it is absolutely not the best gift in the world. To make a birthday celebration more effective than ritual, beautiful flowers or bottles of champagne might be better choices.
My fourth suggestion for employers to think about is to set up a board on the wall for employees to share their “big moments” in life. I know this might sound a bit personally, but the impact of such board cannot be underestimated. Some employees do not feel interesting at work, probably because there is not much to talk with other colleagues. However, the situation can be changed with a public show-board. For instance, by inviting employees to share family photos to win a family dinner in a decent restaurant, you will get employees who are active and interested in this. You can select the funny and nice photos to post them on the board. The next day when employees see a board that is full of interesting pictures, what do you think they will do? They will laugh and talk with each other! To give you a specific example, if you post photo of an employee with her cute baby girl in a nice park, others who are parents might want to chat with her about babies during breaks. The set-up of the board is an icebreaker. This is particularly useful for large size companies.
The fifth tip on improving working atmosphere is to engage employees in meaningful and positive team building events. Instead of organizing a dinner party or a club night, I suggest employers should try some “healthy events. I mean team building events where employees can experience something useful for work and they can have fun at the same time. An outdoor development training program or a room escape can be very helpful for employees to understand teamwork and cooperation. By organizing such outing activities, the chemistry among all team members will certainly be in a positive vibe.
The final piece has something to do with the end of the year meeting. A lot of companies give out small gifts to employees. The specific gift you pick shall be very meaningful for every employee. If it is just a random notebook from a stationary shop, nobody will be impressed by that. However, if it is something interesting and closely related to the company culture, I suppose most employees will enjoy the gift. For instance, I once learnt an interesting annual gift from a friend who works in a gaming company. The company made a very good game about fish in that year. To remind everyone of what they had gone through that year, they received the company-designed fish cushions (fish from the game) with each employee’s work span in the company. My friend still has that fish in his house. To give you another example from my company’s annual meeting, this year we gave a self-designed calendar with photos of every team and outing events. The purpose, of course, is to remind every colleague the fun moment in the company. Before summary 2014 with your personal opinions, ask from a receptionist to a regional manager about how they think of the working atmosphere in the company. Once you figure what are the satisfied and unsatisfied parts, it is not so difficult to make a working atmosphere improving plan in 2015!
The author is Robert Parkinson, CEO & Founder of RMG Selection, a leading recruitment firm in Asia.
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