Whether you’re an entrepreneur with great dreams, a student advancing his or her career by pursuing an MBA degree online, or a celebrated corporate executive at the head of a multinational company, fully understanding the value of happy employees is fundamental to increased productivity, and ultimately, success.
Those in management quickly learn this secret–keeping employees happy results in financial dividends for the entire company. The Harvard Business Review conducted an analysis of hundreds of studies which showed there was an increase of 31 percent in productivity, and 37 percent more sales when the happiness of employees was considered an important part of the business model.
Where to Look for Answers
Achieving employee satisfaction is the challenge. How is it accomplished? How is it measured? And does it require a great deal of investment?
Examples can be learned from institutions of higher learning, even those like the Ohio University Online, which offer courses online.
Learning from those who have already incorporated employee happiness is also a good starting place. Take Google, for example. They are ranked as the world’s best place to work by Fortune magazine. They provide their employees with micro-kitchens conveniently located throughout their buildings, stocked with free food, and having them open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Ways to Achieve Employee Satisfaction
Keeping employees happy may be more complicated than simply providing free food. Workplace happiness is difficult to find for many reasons: the nature of the work, fellow employees, and the fact that human beings in general are not very good at remaining happy for very long.
Certain factors have been uncovered, however, which can shed some light on how to keep employees pleased with your attempts at creating a happy working atmosphere. To begin with, smaller more frequent rewards tend to keep employees happy for longer periods of time–as opposed to a single large, but infrequent, gesture. Frequency, it seems is more powerful in creating that sense of joy than is the size of the reward.
Since people quickly discount events that happen repeatedly (even come to expect them), it is good to keep the events unique, mix them up, add variety to your approach.
These are but a few examples. The bottom line is that keeping employees happy and investing the time and energy into making it happen can be the secret to true success in business. The graphic below includes additional insights and details that should be soundly considered if you are interested in turning your company into a powerhouse.
