What Makes a Positive Working Environment?
If businesses expect to get the most out of every employee every day, then they’ve got to provide an environment that helps promote high performance and efficiency. What does this environment look like though, and how can you achieve it?
Building a positive working environment doesn’t just happen, you have to take steps to ensure it and make it a focus of your business. The right environment can be a huge draw for potential new employees, but if you get it wrong, it can also be a big turnoff.
Communication/ Engagement
There need to be open lines of communication between management and other employees, where employees’ concerns are listened to.
The people who are on the ground, filling key positions, and engaging with the public get a very different view of the business to those in the big offices, and they will have productive ideas on how the business should run. With inpulse.com, you can engage better with your employees and find out how they think the working environment can be improved.
Work/ Life Balance
Everyone’s got to have time to enjoy life, no matter how busy their job gets. When we think about how we reward employees, the first thing that comes to mind is generally money, but work/life balance can be equally important.
A healthy work/life balance helps create a positive working environment and it also allows people to come into work every day refreshed and ready to do their best. Performance shouldn’t be measured by time spent at work, it should be measured by what people accomplish, and often, a better work/life balance allows people to get more work done.
Flexibility
One of the ways you can help rebalance the work/life balance is by allowing people more flexibility in when and where they work.
By allowing people to work from home, you can save them a huge amount of hassle. Many employees spend hours of their day commuting to and from work, when often, they can work just as effectively from home.
When you give people responsibility for their time management and allow them to work from home, they often reward you with increased efficiency.
Training
The best workers want to be in an environment where everyone is constantly improving and helping to push the business to the next level. Many employees will naturally look for ways to keep improving in their job, but businesses have to help facilitate this too.
Providing the right training for employees is important for building a positive working environment, but also for helping the business to keep improving.
Culture
A positive work environment stems from the culture of a company. The values a business espouses will show up in the everyday work people do around the office and inform how people behave.
If a business consistently puts effort into building a strong, positive culture, then this is going to transfer into a good working environment for people to be a part of. A culture where employees feel valued, will help create a positive work environment.
