Two ways to improve your work environment

There are a number of factors that determine the happiness and satisfaction of your workers. Pay rates, workload, stress at home and other factors can directly impact your employees' mental state, and by extension, their productivity.

It's important to realize that there are many factors you can't control. For instance, you can't change the fact a worker recently suffered a loss in the family or that your company can't afford to give raises due to economic conditions. However, you shouldn't tunnel in on these factors. If you truly want to boost engagement, work on changing and improving the things that you can control.

For example, consider overhauling the work environment. Employees often get frustrated in workplaces that are closed off to change and feedback. When they don't feel they have an impact on their work, pessimism may grow and affect other parts of their jobs. Here are two tips for improving the work environment, and perhaps even employee engagement:

1. Managing from the bottom up

Make sure your employees don't feel like cogs in a machine by regularly asking them for feedback and insight on how things could be improved. If these suggestions are put into action, reward the workers who supplied the ideas. This goes a long way to making them feel they are valued by their companies, particularly when upper management is willing to enact their ideas.

“Involving employees in decision-making does not mean catering to their every wish, but it does entail proactively asking for employees’ opinions and valuing their perspectives,” FCW reports.

As an added bonus, it's frequently these employees that best know how basic operations are going, so their input could provide genuinely valuable insight that upper management may have not considered.

2. Recognize success

Employees work hard to ensure everything is done to the best of their ability. You should always recognize this hard work one way or another. That doesn't necessarily mean giving your workers raises every time they perform well, but you could acknowledge them in other ways, such as with special awards, free meals, extra vacation days, etc. There are a number of things you can do to ensure your employees feel appreciated. Highlighting their achievements can pay big dividends in terms of employee morale and positivity within the workplace environment.