How a Good Work Atmosphere Leads to More Success

How a good workplace atmosphere leads to business success

A workplace atmosphere that boosts employee morale provides many benefits, including improved productivity, increased creativity, stress reduction and strong company loyalty. Let’s take a closer look at these key advantages.

• Productivity: A happy work culture can motivate workers to surpass goals, work efficiently and perform better overall. The result may be higher revenue for your business. [See the best tools for setting and tracking goals.]
  
• Creativity: When employees feel comfortable sharing their ideas, their creativity can blossom. This gives your staff the confidence to effectively innovate and efficiently solve problems.
• Improved health: A toxic company culture can increase stress both at work and at home. High stress levels cause physical and mental symptoms that can hurt workers’ overall performance. Employees are generally healthier when they work in a productive atmosphere, which can prevent sick days and leaves of absence.
• Loyalty: When you provide employees with a positive work environment, they often don’t mind going above and beyond what’s requested of them and are less likely to leave for a rival company. Happy staffers root for their business’s success and are committed to carrying out its vision.

How a bad workplace atmosphere hurts your business

A poor workplace atmosphere can lead to poor performance from good employees. In the U.S. alone, employee disengagement costs companies more than $500 billion every year, affecting productivity, wellness and revenue. Here are some ways a bad workplace hurts your business:

• Low employee morale: Ineffective leadership can make good employees feel unwanted and unappreciated. If management is looking out only for their own best interests and doesn’t effectively communicate with the group, the negativity will trickle down to their staff. This negativity can lower employees’ confidence and cause them to lose interest in the company.
• Decreased productivity: Disengaged team members do only enough work to get by and get paid. They aren’t focused on performing their best or on increasing your small business’s productivity, and they may feel burnt out. Their poor attitudes will most likely spread to other colleagues.
• Poor relationships: A weak culture also demoralizes staffers and hurts manager-employee relationships. Workers may opt to leave in favor of a better environment elsewhere. 

In contrast, an engaged employee considers what’s in the company’s best interest. This motivates them and allows them to grow and get better at their job, so both your staff and company thrive.

How to create a good work atmosphere

Creating a strong company culture takes effort. The tips below will set you on the right path, as will these solutions for building a positive sales culture.

Prioritize physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being.

Creating a positive workplace requires a four-prong approach. You want to make employees feel valued physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. 

A business that honors employees as humans instead of faceless worker bees can help reduce turnover, burnout and overall indifference at work. This means supporting employees’ mental health, empowering your staff, encouraging exercise and rewarding top workers with discretionary bonuses. [Learn the reasons employees quit and how to prevent it.]

Ask for employee feedback.

Before you can improve employee engagement, you need to take the pulse of your team. Sometimes receiving feedback may feel taboo, and people may be reluctant to advise someone they consider a superior. 

However, if you don’t know how staffers feel about your workplace, you can’t offer improvements. Fortunately, recent advancements in HR tools have made it easy to conduct surveys and get actionable feedback.

Focus on social responsibility.

Nowadays, both consumers and workers are looking for companies that follow ethical practices. That means lessening your business’s carbon footprint, contributing to charitable causes and taking a stand on social issues. 

Employees are more motivated if they feel the work they do has a meaningful impact and the company culture reflects their values. Determine your business’s core tenets, and invite employees to give back in ways that align with what is personally important to them.

Offer flexible work arrangements.

A survey from The Conference Board found that 65 percent of employees want more flexibility at work, beating out additional pay, bonuses and commissions. Flexible work arrangements lead to increased productivity, lower stress and higher job satisfaction. 

If giving your employees full-time remote schedules isn’t an option, there are other arrangements you can consider. For example, you could offer a compressed workweek with four 10-hour workdays instead of five eight-hour days, or you could offer part-time work or flextime. 

Give employees growth opportunities.

Another way to cultivate a positive work environment is by creating training opportunities for your employees. Good employees seek career growth, and they will quit jobs that do not allow opportunities for professional development. 

Invest in training programs for your employees, and encourage them to take on new projects and improve their skill sets. Your employees will be more dedicated to the organization when they know you’re committed to seeing them succeed. 

Get on the path to a positive workplace culture

If you want to discern whether you’re providing a positive environment, look at your employee turnover rate, worker attendance and customer satisfaction levels. You can gauge the kind of culture you’re facilitating by assessing whether employees and clients are showing loyalty. With the right atmosphere, you’ll see your business’s profits and reputation grow.

Jamie Johnson and Jeffrey Fermin contributed to this article.