March 30, 2017
Employee happiness is directly related to workplace productivity. A recent study by researchers at Warwick University indicated that happiness increased the productivity of workers by 12 per cent. This is yet another reason that you should always endeavour to create a workplace environment that promotes happiness among your employees.
The overall framework of employee happiness has more to do with incentivising your workforce with versatile, opportunity-oriented procedures than big salaries and perks. To this end, it would make great sense to focus on implementing ideas that promote a good work-life balance, encourage career advancement and afford your employees ample benefits. Employees also derive happiness from being paired to the right jobs for which they are qualified and working with bosses and colleagues who appreciate their talents and productive contributions.
An employer can adopt extraordinary measures to shake up organisational culture and tilt the scale toward policies that promote employee happiness. For example, in August 2015, Uniqlo started piloting a four-day-week schedule in order to improve employees’ work-life balance. The thinking behind this strategy is that employees can derive happiness from sufficient time to deal with personal issues such as caring for elderly relatives. However, you can embrace many ordinary measures in your organisation. For example, a flexitime working arrangement might be enough to allow your employees to blend work with their personal responsibilities.
However, considering that employee happiness is intrinsic in nature – that is, it is driven by individual responsiveness to stimuli – there is always the need to adopt appropriate tools and techniques that will facilitate the achievement of your targets. The adoption of technological solutions is particularly useful in developing a skills matrix that matches each employee’s responsibilities to professional qualifications and work experience. At Ability6, we provide relevant cloud-based software solutions that allow employers to integrate automated skill matrix applications into their personnel management programs.