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How Happy Employees Lead to a Successful Business
In this article, we will go over the exact ways in which employee happiness can benefit your workplace and business. We will point out certain studies that have found connections between employee satisfaction and various metrics of business success, including customer satisfaction, productivity, and employee retention rates.
Let’s learn how happy employees can transform your business!
Employee happiness in 2021
To keep employee satisfaction as high as possible, you have to think much bigger than ensuring their paychecks are on time. You have to focus on creating a joyful working environment and a strong company culture. Most employees like to be a part of a well-integrated team that enables them to improve technical skills, fit into the company, and work more efficiently.
Keeping your employees happy and motivated will not only create a pleasant working atmosphere but it can affect your business in a number of ways. If you enable your employees to do their jobs as stress-free as possible, your company will soon reap the benefits.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, when most companies go remote, it’s just a perfect time to make your employees happier. Why? One GetVoIP research found that 90% of remote workers want to work like this for the rest of their career and an option to work remotely makes people 24% more satisfied and happier with their job position.
5 reasons why happy employees can lead to a successful business
Here are some positive effects that employee happiness and satisfaction can have on your business results.
1. Happy employees are more productive
When you have a happy workforce, they will be more likely to concentrate and do their jobs more efficiently. There are several reasons for this.
First, a satisfied employee knows what he/she is working towards. If they’re happy with their salary, workload, and work-life balance, they’ll be happier to put in the work and stay focused on their tasks. An unhappy employee, on the other hand, will spend a lot of their time thinking about their future and maybe even searching for their next job.
Second, it seems that happiness has a positive effect on our brain function overall. Being happier could be connected to better time management, higher productivity, and better collaboration. One study found that happy employees could be up to 12% more productive at work, while unhappy ones are up to 10% less productive.
2. You will have better retention rates
Replacing a lost employee can be a costly process that starts from resourcing and hiring, and lasts throughout their training. From the moment your key employee leaves the company, it can be a whole year until you have a fully trained person to fill their spot.
Some amount of turnover is normal (and even healthy) but you’ll want to mitigate that by improving your company culture and giving your people what they want.
But, what is it they want exactly?
According to an extensive study by the Northcentral University, Arizona, five things directly affect job employee retention:
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Stability: regular paychecks, clear expectations, and other factors that indicate a stable company that’s moving in the right direction.
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Friendly workplace environment: employees’ relationships with their colleagues, management, and customers. This was the most repeated answer among the participants in the study.
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Family orientation: employees prefer when the workplace isn’t rigid and too formal. Instead, they prefer to feel like they’re working with friends and family.
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Flexibility: one easy way to improve employee satisfaction is to increase flexibility when it comes to working schedules. People like to have time for education and leisure activities that contribute to their work-life balance.
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Commitment: people like to feel that their employer cares about their wellbeing and invests in the issues they consider important, like development and training.
All of these factors work together to create the most important value: congruence. The researchers highlight this value as the most important, as it represents the alignment of your employees’ values with your own. This is the single most important metric that indicates the success of companies when it comes to employee retention.
3. Happier employees mean happier customers
Employee satisfaction becomes even more important if those employees have direct contact with your customers. Happiness (or unhappiness, for that matter) can easily rub off on your customers and leave them with a lasting impression of your brand.
Here’s a small case study. The famous fast-food restaurant Chick-fil-A scored higher in the QSR report than all its competitors on two crucial metrics: revenue per restaurant and politeness. If you enjoy Chick-fil-A, it’s clear to you that this is because of their impeccable customer service, for which they’ve already received several accolades.
How does Chick-fil-A management explain this success? One of their key strategies to have the most polite employees is to invest in them!
4. Your employees will be more creative and engaged
A happier employee will have positive feelings about their work and display a higher level of confidence, both of which can lead to higher creativity and engagement levels. This can be explained in a number of ways.
For example, an overworked employee balancing multiple tasks will hardly find the time to get creative and socialize with coworkers. Isolated employees who don’t have a friend at work won’t have a great time at brainstorming sessions where people have to voice their opinions and present their ideas to a larger crowd. A happy employee with a well-balanced workload and a good social status in your team won’t have any of these problems.
Studies show that having friends at work can do wonders for your employees in several ways, including improving their engagement. People who have a friend at the office also look forward to going to work. So, try to help people socialize through team-building activities and social events!
5. You could increase profits
Finally, a strong company culture that prioritizes employee satisfaction can end up increasing profitability. The relationship may not be as direct as, for example, cutting production costs, but it’s important enough to make you think. In fact, one study found that an engaged workforce and behaviors connected with such a workforce can lead to a 21% increase in profitability.
How do you achieve this?
First, you need to treat your people as stakeholders of your future. Instill a company culture that creates a feeling you’re all pulling in the same direction and your employees aren’t working only to receive a paycheck at the end of the month. They should strive to achieve better results so that they can contribute to your success, which they perceive as their own.
Second, you should focus on performance management activities, which include things like setting measurable KPIs for each position, asking people what they need to do their job effectively, and providing feedback along the way. Only when you have these things in place, you can start creating an engaged workforce that feels valued.
Final word
As you can see, a happy working environment can affect your business in a lot of ways, from reducing people turnover to increasing profits.
Your job now is to do your best to create such an environment and to prioritize employee happiness in your business strategies. Not only will this create a better company that you will find joy to run, but it will start to pay off in ways you never imagined.
This article was written in cooperation with Jakub Kubrynski, the CEO of DevSkiller.
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