It is not always a simple idea to keep employees happy without giving them a certain incentive or simply raising their salary. There are different ways on how to keep employees happy without a salary raise.
As they say, you need to get the best out of your employees and that can be achieved through various ways like encouragement or employee motivation. Money is not the only thing that can keep an employee happy.
How to Keep Employees Happy?
There are various ways in which employee productivity and employee happiness can be maintained harmoniously.
If your company is on a tight budget then you can use any of these steps to ensure happy employees without spending on their raise. Especially during recession time or when your company sales go through a tight phase.
1. Good interaction methods:
A proper interaction process is very vital in a company to keep employees happy as well as satisfied. Direct interaction is important to address every individual employee’s needs and issues.
Also, a proper interaction process can open up ways to directly interact through higher personnel which makes the common employee feel valued. Therefore proper interaction is a must to keep employees satisfied.
2. Provide flexibility in work:
Proper flexibility is something that every employee craves but doesn’t get most of the time. Especially in today’s time flexibility in the workplace is a very important thing to consider.
At some point, every employee needs to spend some quality time with their family but fails to do so even on Sundays due to lots of workloads. So provision for temporary leaves or day offs can go far in keeping your employees satisfied with you.
3. Stop ordering:
As an employer, it is your primary duty to bring the best out of your employees, but not at the cost of burdening your employees with heavy project works and assignments. Gauze their capacity and assign them tasks according to that to avoid overburdening.
Let them choose their responsibility instead of you burdening them with a heavy amount of expectations and assignments.
4. Give away rewards:
Sometimes, occasional rewards, fun filled events can give more joy to an employee than a raise in salary. Try your hands in various kinds of competitions such as loser competition or employee of the month, which can keep the enthusiasm going on without the need to raise.
The reward can be in any form such as gift coupons, or free dinner cards to any restaurants with near and dear ones. These rewards which will enhance the quality time spent with the family will always be taken as positive feedback and will make the employee happy.
5. Provide words of gratitude:
Showing gratitude is the best way to make an employee feel encouraged and happy. Mere words of thank you or good job can not only bring a smile upon your employee’s face but also ensure that he/she gets motivated to work best the next time also.
Therefore a few gestures of gratitude never fail. Gratitude can be in any form, like, a smile and pat on the back or a word of praise in front of all the staff. These public thanks also increase the potential of the employee as well as other employees who are watching.
Public thanks can be organized as a weekly event to thank a few employees for their work, in that way more employees will get interested to work for the company with full enthusiasm.
6. Free training and courses:
A workplace is a place where you get to learn so many things apart from working such as time management, teamwork, and so on, which aren’t taught anywhere else. Apart from that, a company should provide free training programs and learning courses to improve employee skills.
These courses not only improve your company’s overall standard but also encourage a large number of employees to take part in these free courses which are normally very pricey.
Such training usually takes the shape of online training courses or MOOCs, like Coursera or edx, for improvement in the standard of any general employee. Additionally, your organization can provide various other training and courses privately such as management additional training or organization-specific training that coincide with your company policies.
7. Keep your employees updated with the company’s affairs:
Always raising an employee’s salary is not the option to increase company productivity. Keeping an employee updated with all the recent management affairs of the organization is important.
Providing every individual of your company with transparency can create a positive feeling as well as the employee feels valued which is an important step. An employee needs to feel that a company is his/her second home. That is how you can keep an employee happy in your company.
8. Provide means to become successful:
Your employee doesn’t only need transparency in a company, but also means by which he/she can achieve the goals without much effort.
You, as an employer, need to provide your employees with tools and means by which they can succeed in their daily goals instead of setting up rigid rules and regulations and terms and conditions. You need to tell them, or more importantly advise them how the work needs to be done than just assigning the task.
At the organizational level, this kind of attitude from an employer can induce a sense of freedom and can boost up an employee’s esteem as well as the company’s overall productivity.
9. Allow flexibility in the dress code:
It is a good thing to keep a dress code to maintain the working atmosphere, but at the same time, you don’t have to make it a rigid rule. Just allow the flexibility of dressing at some points so that the employee feels free to work in the company. Or alternatively, you can keep some flexible dress code that would simply suit your employee as well as won’t hinder your working atmosphere.
10. Provide with exciting business trips with family:
An employee needs to spend some quality time with his/her family. And if an employer can provide him/her with it, an employee becomes happy. When sending any of your employees to a certain business trip, try making some arrangements for their families to go along as well. That way the business trip won’t look burdensome and they can be able to spend good time with their families as well.
11. Give an opportunity to explore other career paths:
Many people join the company based on their trade expertise and experience in that field. But those fields are not equally exciting for all of them. Some follow a particular line of study because they did not get the chance to opt in another field.
But, you can give your employees the golden opportunity to explore other fields in the company by which they prove their competency in that field. This will not only be a life-changing experience for the worker but it is totally rewarding to both the employee and the organization as the employee will be working in his field that he always wanted to work and the organization in return, will be getting a self-motivated worker.
12. Involve them in the decision-making process:
When the employees are made to involve in the decision room, they feel the vibe of being in the responsibility for a great task and thus, start to take interest in the work. This way your employees can feel the responsibility of making a decision and thus getting to work on his/her faults that they make while working.
This acts as a self-motivating tool for which employees can feel rewarded if they provide useful inputs and see a direct profit from their actions.
13. Healthy employee, happy employee:
Health is of paramount importance to an individual and no doubt a person will have an affinity for that person or group who can assist with health related problems. An organization can do so by helping their employee in covering up the cost of medicines, giving free full body check-ups, conducting seminars and workshops on personal hygiene and healthcare.
Also, a healthy employee is a productive employee. So, the company can take advantage of such a situation and can ripe an indirect benefit from such initiatives.
14. Creating an environment of cultural and social hub:
Cultural – for the successful handling of workers it is important to provide them more than just a basic salary. Cultural activities have been an integral part of human life.
Although, in modern society setting, where everything is moving fast and people hardly get any time to do other works other than job tasks, an organization should be responsible for creating good working as well as social culture for the well-being of his workers.
A good working culture includes better working conditions, transparency in all the processes, and a clear structure for sorting out any types of problems. Social culture may include departmental parties, family get together and so on.
Social – Human beings are a social animal and it is for this reason that you should stop treating them like a typical bot and give them ample space to socialize. Socialize in the sense to conduct events and festivals in the favor of your employees.
This will keep their productivity level high and will make them feel like they are a part of a big family that cares and nurtures them.
15. Consider your employee’s opinion:
This is like performing the classic market survey. But, if you want to motivate employees and want to keep them satisfied then the best way to do so is to get feedback from your employees.
They can give you the insights that you might not have considered before. You may even get feedback on your current reward system and to what extent your workers are satisfied. This will allow you to optimize your tactics to keep the happiness gauge level of employees full.
16. Provide them with other benefits:
You can keep your workers satisfied by lending your hand in easing up their home budget problem to a little extent. Provide them with regular housing rents, or monthly transportation charges.
You can also give them some extra allowances like internet use charge or family trip allowances to keep your workers motivated and stay focused on their work. Depending upon the needs and wishes of people you can provide them with some other means of getting more money to keep them satisfied.
17. Leaders are key to success:
To keep your workers focused and productive you must have efficient managers and executives who know how to work with people. A follower is happy only when a leader is efficient and capable in the work.
So it becomes a key point to make a correct decision of leaders who can extract work from employees but at the same time, can keep them motivated and happy.
18. Show them that they mean a lot:
Recognition is one of the biggest rewards that a worker can get from his superiors. When a man starts to get recognition for his hard work and goodwill, it inspires him to do more of that.
Recognition from the superior can mean a lot to your employees. So make sure to appreciate the good work and rewards them with appropriate schemes for fulfilling their tasks punctually and diligently.
Following these rules can not only ensure that your employees are happy working with you but also help you increase your company productivity and sales by a decent milestone. Also, they won’t easily leave the workplace, if you create the workplace in such a way that it’s employee-friendly.
