Employees feeling comfortable in the workplace is important. When they feel comfortable, they will feel more satisfied with their work and will have better work performance. To help your employees feel more comfortable you can encourage employees to speak up, emphasize safe procedure, and reward good work.
Encourage Employees to Speak Up
Employees are more likely to speak up when they know that their ideas will be listened to. As a leader, you need to actively solicit their opinions. You need to avoid public reprimanding of employees and handle any problems gracefully and with kindness. Encourage your employees to speak up and give them the confidence to do so by helping them learn how to speak up with high quality ideas. Employees who speak up with ideas that have strong rationale, high feasibility, strong organizational focus, and high novelty are more likely to be better performers in their job. Encourage these ideas so employees will continue to improve the quality of the workplace.
Emphasize Safe Procedure
Safe procedures are important in helping your employees feel comfortable in the workplace. You need to ensure safety standards are in place first. Your employees will need to be trained on these procedures so they can participate in keeping the workplace safe as well as feeling more comfortable themselves. To help train your employees you can create training videos. Making your training videos fun can help keep employees engaged. Training videos can also help you maximize your time as they can be reused for each new employee, and as periodic refreshers on the procedures.
Reward Good Work
Employees will be more likely to feel comfortable in the workplace if they don’t have to guess about their work performance. Workers who are left guessing about their work performance will feel less comfortable, while workers who are appreciated will feel more satisfied with their work. When your employees do good work, make sure that you let them know and show your appreciation. You can take your appreciation a step further and offer external incentives. You can have an employee of the month to reward hard work and even offer a gift card.
Your employees’ comfort will help your business. When your employees are comfortable, they will feel satisfied in their work and will do a better job. Employees that feel comfortable will be more encouraged to speak up, emphasize safe procedure, and reward good work.
For more information on leading your team, check out these 7 tips to balance the demands of modern business leadership.
