5 Simple steps for employee happiness
Happy employees are critical and the key to having happy customers and following these five suggestions can help your business develop and your team become more productive and positive.
As a business owner running a growing business, you’re probably always looking for ways to keep your customers happy and coming back for more. It’s an important requirement for any business to keep a healthy customer base.
Over the years with my experience of running and working in businesses I’ve realised one common theme, the best way to support customer happiness is actually to ensure you’ve got your employee happiness in check first.
Happy employees are more likely to go the extra mile and not only support your customers, but they will ultimately show more resilience in challenging situations and help the business to grow its profits. All of these factors combined result in more satisfied customers and better retention rate.
I’ve outlined a few different ways you can keep your employees happy and in turn have a happy and loyal customer base as well.
- Provide Meaningful employee development. Many employees want to know their path for growth and development. This doesn’t mean automatically they have to be promoted to a managerial position and in a small business a promotion up the ranks might not even exist. Some people don’t want to be managers, some value job security much more highly. When your team knows they have a solid future ahead of them, they’re more likely to go the extra mile for your customers because they know it will benefit them and their future as well.
- Have a process for training and support for people in your team who do want to develop its important for them to know and realise these things don’t happen overnight, you need to have dedicated time for training, one-on-one coaching for them. If your employees have been trained on how to have difficult discussions or make difficult decisions these skills will translate in the interactions with your customers in a positive way
- Demonstrate you’re open to fun. A fun environment makes a huge difference to employee happiness and general morale within your team. It’s important to get the balance right but understanding what the team appreciates is critical. For example, your team maybe in the middle of a huge project, maybe provide breakfast: some milk and cereal and a visit from the coffee van can go a long way to demonstrating you have the team’s back.
- Show your team they’re supported. Your team need to know you have their back, people need an outlet to share what’s going on a place where they feel supported and not scared or micromanaged. A lot of businesses overlook this and business owner can very often get stuck on just driving productivity and results only. One of the very best ways to support employees is through a strong open culture that supports open communication. It’s critical that you dedicate time to listen well and know how to give and accept feedback, this is much more likely to create a healthy environment where your team feel and know they are supported.
- Provide appropriate reward and recognition. Recognising and rewarding your team is great for building culture and camaraderie but it’s important that you tie these rewards back to performance and results and try to avoid rewarding people for just meeting standards and expectations. In our business, we focus on customer service and client satisfaction. We want to see people going above and beyond for the client, supporting team mates and developing new processes that benefit others. It’s important to remember not everyone likes the big stage, some prefer individual recognition. So, it’s important to have both team and individual reward and recognition.
Rewarding employees who provide excellent service sets a great example for the rest of the team and it inspires them to go out of their way to provide excellent service.
Regardless how you go about rewarding your team, investing in happy employees who feel supported and glad to be a part of the team will pretty much guarantee you results in a more loyal and happy customer experience.