The single greatest strength any business can have is its people. And to build a synergistic team of people that crush their goals and objectives, they need to have chemistry.
We call that a healthy work culture or positive work environment!
Sure, your business might seem functional when everyone is tucked away in their own little silos, keeping their heads down in their work. However, the output of true teamwork is bred from a work culture built on respect and compassion for one another.
To that end, let’s cover the four best ways to foster a cohesive and cooperative work environment. If you model even one or two of these suggestions, your company will be miles ahead in unifying its workforce.
Tips to Develop a Positive Work Environment
1. Acknowledge Milestones and Life Events
Acknowledgment of the things going on in a person’s life outside of work matters. While employees are paid to be there and render a service to the business, they are still human beings. People shouldn’t be treated solely as transactions in business. That’s because humans are emotional beings, no matter how much or little they care to admit it.
No matter a person’s role in a company, they ought to extend sympathy and sentiment to their colleagues, managers, and subordinates. For example, something as simple as sympathy gift baskets can show empathy and help a colleague through difficult times. Alternatively, offering them your time outside of work can show you care about them beyond the time you’re paid to be around them. Thoughtful expressions like this foster stronger relationships within the team, reinforcing that employees’ well-being is valued.
2. Encourage Open Communication
Communication is the basis of a happy and healthy work culture. Working groups that express their needs and proactively support others in need will outperform every other business. For this to work, everyone in the business needs to feel comfortable in sharing their weaknesses with others. And by the same token, they also need to be willing to accept critique.
On the other side of this, the givers of said critique need to be polite about it as much as they can. They should never hold back their honest opinions, but they ought to display those opinions with tact. If people don’t share honest feedback, then it will severely damper the speed at which others can become better at their work.
Conversely, if people do not handle critique well, they will hamper their own professional development. People like this ought to be gently corrected to receive critique. This is a big deal for every business and should be a major decision factor for any new hires.
Your goal for your business, whether you’re in management or not, is to lead by example with this mindset. Make frequent mentions that this is how the company will mature as a body of people. If you do this, the patterns of the culture will follow.
3. Prioritize Mental Health Support
Now, more than ever, mental health is a bigger concern in workplaces. According to an APA survey, 92% of workers stated it is important that their employer values their emotional and psychological health. To address this, employers should encourage employees to take care of their mental well-being, providing resources to support them when appropriate and necessary.
Think of it from this perspective. Many businesses will provide gym memberships for workers wanting to prioritize physical fitness. Why should mental health support be omitted? The same kind of compassion for physical fitness ought to be extended for mental and emotional health as well.
Promoting wellness programs — such as mindfulness workshops, yoga sessions, or mental health awareness seminars — can reduce stress levels and improve overall employee morale. And, of course, providing access to a gym doesn’t hurt either.
4. Encourage Proper Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is a continually divisive issue in modern workplaces. Some opt for the traditional method, which establishes set times when people work separated by time they aren’t working. Others cultivate a dynamic that “blends” work-life balance, which blurs the lines of when people ought to be on-call and when they are off-limits. While this can alleviate certain stressors, it can also create new ones.
Work-life blends, when policed well, can work. However, if they don’t monitor it closely, employers can gradually lose awareness of the imbalance. Over time, they may become numb to the fact that their full-time workers are leaning more heavily to one side or the other.
Take the following, for example. A worker is given the permission to work a hybrid schedule where they can come in and out of the office as they please, work at whatever time of day they want, so long as they bill a minimum amount of hours per week, and get all of their work done in that time. The problem is that this scenario could be set up to defeat itself if it’s measured inadequately.
On the one hand, the employee could slack off and accomplish way less than they should, which, eventually, will become apparent. In that case, that employee probably won’t stick around at the company — i.e., they will probably be let go.
On the other hand, the employee might fall into a pattern of overworking themself to satisfy an ambiguous standard of work output. Over time, this will drain them, and they might decide to leave the company.
So what’s to be done? Conduct regular check-ins with your employees to make sure they’re not abusing any work policies or privileges. At the same time, make sure those same privileges and policies aren’t abusing them.
Go Forth and Build a Better Culture
If you focus on these four core areas of your business, you’ll set it up for a much healthier culture filled with people who think not only for themselves but for others around them, too. Ultimately, you want people to care about the well-being, success, and livelihood of others as much as their own. When that happens, you’ll have cultivated a group of people worth sticking beside forever.
Content Marketing Manager, has been with Rottenpanda.com since 2020. Loves writing and reading ton of books. With a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Emily specializes in writing long contents, making videos and making complex subjects easy to understand. In addition to writing articles, Emily also a Poet writer, Dog lover and Love cars.
