6 Tips To Help Your Team Be Happy In The Workplace

The new year can be a great time to refocus on your team’s happiness levels, ensuring folks are energized after the break and feeling motivated to do their best work in the coming months.

In fact, research shows that happier employees are 12 percent more productive than their counterparts, so experimenting with tactics designed to strengthen working relationships and inspire new ways of working together is especially worthwhile.

Listen to Your People

Make yourself open and available to feedback from your employees by setting “office hours” where people can stop by for an informal 1:1, either in-person or online, on a weekly or monthly basis. This will both build trust and allow you to implement suggestions that you might not have otherwise had an opportunity to hear. Another approach is to create a digital poll with five survey questions designed to help keep a pulse on employee sentiment.

Give Regular Kudos

Most people tend to associate feedback with bad news, but critical evaluation is really just one kind of feedback that should be balanced with another important form of feedback: appreciation. When you express appreciation, you’re supporting someone’s behavior and encouraging them to do more of it. And being specific and sincere about how you express that appreciation — as in saying more than a generic “Good job!” — gives people a clear picture of their strengths and how they’re adding value.

Celebrate New Employees

When new hires join the team, take the time to celebrate their arrival and mark the occasion with introductions. On someone’s first day, encourage them to share an introduction, either in a meeting or electronically, and describe who they are, what they’ve worked on and what they like to do for fun. Alternatively, ask managers to introduce their new hires and explain what they’ll be working on. This goes a long way in creating a feel-good factor in the office, making the new hire feel welcomed to the family and also providing existing employees with useful information about their new teammate.

Get to Know One Another

Memories of the holiday party may have only just begun to fade, but it’s never too early to plan for your next team offsite and help beat the post-holiday blues during the first quarter. It’s important for a team’s happiness and performance to take some focused time to align on projects, check in on morale, and celebrate a job well done. It’s also important to have a little fun, whether that means escaping from your usual surroundings or rallying everyone around a creative challenge. Switch up offsites by location, length and topic, making sure to alternate between team-building activities and planning meetings.

Build a Buddy System

If you work at a large company, your team members may interact with a couple dozen people but still have hundreds of other coworkers they’ve never met. To help foster community across the organization, consider setting up people as random pairs or “buddies” and encouraging them to meet for coffee (or tea, or lunch).

Don’t Forget to Set Goals

Yes, goals help with your business’ bottom line, but they are also key to boosting team morale. For example, if you use messenger apps to converse and collaborate with colleagues, you can also take advantage of bots. Bots may sound futuristic, but they are essentially like having a virtual team member who can help with all kinds of tasks, including goal-setting.

Goal apps can add some additional structure and support to keep you and your team on track. This way, you won’t ever miss a big win or the chance to show appreciation when a team member hits a goal or success metric, thereby allowing them to be celebrated and to feel good about it too.

Christina Meng is a Customer Success Manager at Slack.