4 Ways To Create a Happier Workplace for Your Team

In these trying times, it can be tricky to maintain team morale and keep people’s spirits up, which is why a manager’s role is more critical than ever.

Remote working adds another layer of complexity, so use online systems and apps to bring the team together for regular meetings. Also, recommend to your colleagues to stick to a daily routine. Going for a walk before work and adhering to the same distance as the typical journey to work provides the separation between the workday and leisure time at home.

Take breaks from work at the usual times and finish the day at the same time and with another walk. The routine mirrored to the ordinary workday will make it easy to adjust when the team is back working in the office. As a manager, you’ll need to do some team-building exercises to get the cohesion and productivity back to the levels it was before the requirement for all workers to work from home.

Therefore consider some of these options to make your workplace buzz with its typical energy and ambience.

Embrace Team Building Activities

Team-building is seen as an essential tool for managers to leverage if they want to improve collaboration and catalyse bonding between people who work closely with one another.

What you might not realise is that it can also be a great way to blow off steam and ease tension in the office, especially if you choose one of the fun team-building activities from this list. This is particularly relevant in the contexts of the ongoing pandemic that is sweeping the globe at the moment.

Enforced lockdowns in many nations mean that teams cannot meet up in person and are forced to communicate and work remotely.
When measures to stop the spread of coronavirus are eased, and people return to the workplace, team-building activities like these will be more critical than ever.

The weeks or months of separation from colleagues will mean that bridges need to be rebuilt between members. These activities will also ease people back into the daily routine of work, rather than throwing them in at the deep end.

Show Appreciation

In the hustle and bustle of the workplace, it can be easy to get caught up in handling your own responsibilities and thus overlook the need to make sure that the people in your team receive the recognition they deserve for all their efforts.

Face-to-face praise is an effective motivator and mood-booster, but you can also provide recognition via email or in other settings, such as meetings. Whichever approach you take, make sure that you demonstrate how much you appreciate what employees are doing to contribute to the company regularly. It will even stop skilled members leaving for greener pastures since studies show that a lack of appreciation is often the cause of job disgruntlement.

Allow Flexibility

Striking the right balance between professional and personal responsibilities is crucial to keeping team members happy. If people know that they can find fulfilment in both parts of their life, they will be more content overall.

Many businesses have adopted the idea of flexible working to make sure that people can fit their job around their life, and this has proven particularly impactful in the wake of the current coronavirus crisis. In the future, once things return to normal, no doubt this will play an even more significant part in determining team satisfaction levels.

Trust Your Team

It may seem obvious, but the more you show that you believe in the abilities of those who work as part of your team, the more likely they will be to live up to their potential and prove what great things they can achieve. In turn, this will mean that they are happier and more engaged with their jobs, rather than feeling like they are under constant scrutiny or being overburdened with pressure to do exactly what you tell them.

The temptation to micromanage needs to be resisted to achieve this; you can offer as much support and encouragement to employees as you like, you just need to also know when to step back and give them room to spread their wings. There is a reason that trust has been proven to be influential over how happy team members are in their current role, making this a priority for managers to foster.