Since your employees spend a considerable amount of time at work, when it comes to maintaining a clean and neat workplace, it is imperative that you provide a clean and neat environment for your employees to work in. There are some simple things you can do to help yourself create a productive and stress-free environment if you make some simple changes to your surroundings.
The following tips will help you to ensure your employees are working in the best conditions possible:
Recreational Spaces Should Be Provided
Even though you need to make sure that your employees are able to concentrate at work, you should also ensure that your office has a comfortable space for them to recharge and relax. The result can be increased productivity, reduced stress levels, and happier workers as a result of all of these factors. Additionally, they must be allowed to take any breaks they require from time to time in addition to their formal breaks. It is possible to include coffee counters as well as a chillout area.
Organize And Clean It
There is little chance of getting a productive and happy team when offices are unkempt and unorganized, due to the probability of achieving an unhappy and unproductive workforce. Cleanliness in the workplace is even more essential when it comes to incorporating COVID-19. Employees need to feel secure while they work; they need to be able to feel safe while doing their jobs. Be sure to provide everything they need so that their working space and their hands are sanitized in the long run.
Add Plants Around The Office
Your employees will be greatly benefited by adding plants to your office. Plants have huge benefits for their psychological well-being and general well-being. An improved environment can be attributed to the presence of plants at the workplace due to their lots of benefits. There are a lot of proven benefits that they provide, such as reducing stress, enhancing creativity, improving the air quality, and providing a better environment. Spider plants and aloe are just a few plants that are known to have relaxing properties and can be used in offices to create an enjoyable atmosphere. I always suggest to you to think about the plants in your office. Could the cleaning staff help with the maintenance of the plants?
Add Variety
Everyone doesn’t want to spend the same amount of time doing the same thing each day. By rotating the working lists, you can easily avoid this problem. The risk of them becoming bored is lower. It’s okay to let your employees decide what tasks they want to complete, and if something needs to take precedence, make sure you communicate with them. Holding a weekly meeting will help them with this, as well as telling them what needs to be done once a month so they can plan their day accordingly. Give your team some autonomy and don’t micromanage.
What about your working from home team?
These tips should help you to create a positive working office for your employees, however, many employees are now working from home too. So, you need ot think about these too. An employee journey is different to what it was ten years ago.
Many people now work differently because of Covid-19. It seems that people are now working from home more than ever and it is something that is going to stick around for some time. Increasingly, people are choosing to work from home on a permanent basis, a move that is attracting businesses.
Working remotely provides many benefits, such as reduced business costs and a balanced work-life balance for employees. Nevertheless, it does come with downsides as well such as lack of co-worker interaction, loneliness, low work-life balance, and feeling disconnected. For this reason, employers must ensure that their employees have a positive experience when working from home.
Make sure your working from home experience is positive by providing the necessary equipment, online training, and setting up a virtual mailbox.
Want to stay positive but don’t know how? Consider the following suggestions:
Keep Them Informed
The tendency for remote workers to feel deprived of the knowledge and experience of their colleagues, especially in cases where there is also a team of workers at the office, is quite common. If your employees working from home were more involved with the company, it would be better if you could keep them in the loop more frequently. In order for them to be fully aware of their position, they want all the latest information at their fingertips. Having a lot of motivation is not detrimental to your health. There is no need for every sales team to meet once a week or once a month, it is far better to create a bulletin board that provides the essential updates, and ensure that everyone is aware just like they were sitting in the office.
Adaptability Is The Key To Success
Working from home has many positive aspects, one of the more positive aspects being the flexibility it can bring; however, unless you offer it as a flexible position, your work from home won’t be flexible. The more strict you are with your working times, the more opportunities you will miss out on to be productive and productive in your job. In order to be able to fulfil your responsibilities, you need to be as flexible as possible. There may be parents who are working and they want to work split shifts during the day so they can spend time with their children during the day. In a situation where you want to be flexible without sacrificing coverage of all the necessary hours, consider talking to each colleague about what the best and most productive working hours are, so they can come to an agreement.
Holidays & Breaks Should Be Encouraged
It can be great to work outside the traditional office environment – you have no commute to contend with, for instance. Increasing flexibility can lead to overworking, as we are unable to switch off at the end of the day. Those without a dedicated workspace in their home will particularly struggle with this.
Allow your employees to take regular breaks throughout the day, not just at lunchtime, to develop a nurturing company culture. You should post your own recommendations on your company’s communication platform as well as following HSE’s recommendation to take a 5- to 10-minute break every hour.
Taken when travelling the world (or even just going for a coffee) is not an option, taking annual leave might seem absurd. However, that’s not the case. You can benefit your employees by giving them more time away from their screens and professional responsibilities. It’s crucial that parents take time off to recharge their mental health and wellbeing, whether they’re reading a book, video-chatting with family, or taking care of their kids during half term.
Create a company culture based on trust and mutual respect by encouraging your employees to take the time off they need or go the extra mile and offer unlimited vacation days.
Your working from home employees may be tempted not to take as much time off and overwork when they have easy access to the systems at home.
Check-In Frequently
There is of great importance for you to check in frequently when you have a remote team that works from their home. To make sure they are not necessarily being hampered in any way in working from home, but to instead find out how things are going for them. What are they doing to make sure that they are being as predictable as they possibly can? Have they been able to achieve a good balance between work and leisure time? Can they perform their job duties as required by their position if they have every resource they need?
Remote teams need communication in order to stay connected, informed, and entertained.
Working from home puts you in touch with colleagues using tools like Slack, Zoom and Monday.com as well as live messaging systems.
Don’t forget to keep your team informed regularly, whether that’s via Slack messages or an all-hands video call. An open, transparent, and trustworthy company culture is also crucial during times of uncertainty, especially during national elections.
Don’t only talk about serious topics. We must communicate outside of work tasks as part of our company culture. Consider creating virtual spaces for ‘water cooler’ chat – for example, a Slack channel for meme sharing, or a virtual office cafe accessible via video call.
Organise Virtual Socials
It’s imperative to keep company social events going while people are out of the office since it is one of the most exciting parts of the company culture.
During these times when we are confined to the confines of our homes, there are a great many social events you can host. A virtual pub quiz, remote yoga classes, or after-work drinks on Zoom can all be considered legal lockdown activities.
In this case, it is actually not fun at all when you force it to be so. In that case, make sure to invite the entire team to participate in the training, but do not make it mandatory.
You need to pay attention to all of these areas if you want to have a happy, productive, and positive team working from home and in the office. Can you let me know if there are any other suggestions that need to be added to this list? In the comments section below, we would appreciate it if you could add a few of your own.
