How to Create a Positive Work Culture

How often have you had an employee who comes to work and is clearly in a negative mindset? Are they consistently showing up to work late or complaining about the jobs they are assigned? As soon as you know it, this infectious negative attitude is spreading to other team members and is having a serious impact on your workplace. Unfortunately, when members of a team are underperforming or continually show up to work with bad attitudes, team leaders are quick to blame the employees. However, this can sometimes be a result of a negative workplace culture. Employees are an investment, and you can only expect to get out of them as much as you put in. Take an objective look at your workplace and see if you can identify areas that could be improved to boost employee morale and encourage productivity. Here are a few areas you could consider improving to achieve a positive workplace culture.

Regular Encouragement

No one deserves to feel underappreciated at work. If an employee is constantly made aware of their shortcomings and rarely given encouragement, they are likely to experience emotional fatigue. Emotional fatigue can lead to feelings of self-doubt and apprehension about going to work. If you would like to learn more about the effects of emotional fatigue, among other types of fatigue, on an employee, check out this comprehensive guide WorkSafe Australia has put together. Luckily, one simple way to combat emotional fatigue is by providing regular positive reinforcement. Recognising and rewarding a good work ethic is essential to keeping your employees happy and increasing their productivity. This reinforcement doesn’t just have to be verbal praise. Simple acts like buying lunches or coffees for the team every so often or events such as Christmas parties and company bonding outings can go a long way to raising morale. After all, you do catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Open Communication and Dialogue

While one-way encouragement is great for improving employee morale, a two-way open dialogue is the key to improving workplace communications and creating a positive culture. Employees must feel comfortable enough to raise any issues or grievances they have otherwise feelings of resentment can build up and lead to your employees always having one foot out the door. Ensuring you have weekly or regular meetings where your employees have an opportunity to bring up any issues they have, or simply just reassuring them that they can come to you at any time can go a long way to improving communication in your workplace.

Promote Safety in your Workplace

A positive workplace culture isn’t simply one that makes the employees feel happy and driven at work, but also one that makes them feel safe. No person should feel like they are unnecessarily putting their own safety at risk at work. Everyone has the right to return home in the same condition they arrived and if an employee feels like there are effective systems in place to ensure this, they are going to feel much more positive about being at work.As stated by WorkSafe Australia, the most important step in promoting a safety culture is to clearly communicate your companies safety standards and practices to employees. This can be done through regular toolbox meetings or by creating detailed Safe Work Method Statements (SWMS) for job sites. Platforms such as Trak can allow you to deliver safety reports and SWMS to employees and contractors remotely on site so that you can be assured your employees feel safe at work.

Allow your Employees Opportunity to Grow

If you find that your employees are becoming more dissatisfied about working and are looking for their first chance to leave your company, you may find that they don’t feel like they have any room to grow in your business. Being clear about what opportunity there is within the business and how you can help them grow in their career can go a long way to reducing this feeling they have.There are many different opportunities you can offer your team to help them grow, the most obvious being a promotion. A pay rise in recognition for their hard work or extra responsibility they have taken on is a great way to keep your employees happy. Other opportunities you can offer are educational courses such as relevant certificates to help them improve their skills or simply teaching them new skills on site.

Challenge your Employees

Coming to work, day in and day out, doing the same tasks with no extra challenges is a quick way to become complacent and disinterested in your work. However, if you give your employees some extra challenges within their working day, whether it’s a slightly more demanding task or an extra responsibility, they are much less likely to become bored. This requires a bit of trust to be placed in your team but it can provide great results beyond removing complacency in your employees. The more responsibilities your team can handle, the less you have to take on, freeing up time in your own day. Take a step back, look at your company objectively and ask yourself, “am I doing all I can to create a positive culture at my workplace?” Simply by reassessing and improving in these areas, you may find your employee’s productivity and enthusiasm soaring. Also, if you would like to find out more about how Trak, our comprehensive job management platform, can improve the safety culture at your workplace, you can contact us here or feel free to directly email us at contact@trak.com.au.