Last updated on August 12th, 2021 at 03:34 pm
Whether running a fully remote company or working on building a massive organization based out of one location, creating the ideal work environment for your employees is critical to success.
For any business to succeed, it comes down to how good the team is and how well they can work together so that they can deliver results and ultimately make the customers happy.
Five Components of an Ideal Working Environment
1. Quality Leadership
Working for an uninspiring or inadequate boss completely kills productivity and morale. This is why having the right leadership qualities in place to inspire your team is the primary factor in building an ideal work environment.
As employees work together, someone will inevitability have to lead the group no matter how small the team. A leadership team should have a strong work ethic, a solid direction of strategy, and excellent management tactics which fosters an ideal work environment much faster than a team without these qualities.
Whoever you are choosing to lead your team, ensure that they create an atmosphere of togetherness and lead everyone toward a common goal.
Dale Carnegie Training’s on how to engage employees states that businesses that have engaged employees outperform those with disengaged ones by 202%.
If your business is making mid to low six figures, 202% percent could be the difference between your company hitting that million dollar per year run rate or staying on a flat growth trajectory.
2. Creativity
Without your employees coming up with quality ideas your company will never truly succeed. An ideal work environment fosters creativity which then leads to better solutions to issues that may arise.
If your mission is to grow your business, and it should be, you must be willing to listen to your team, empathize with them, and not shut down their ideas. By doing this, your team will be incentivized to offer up more solutions to company problems and you are actively promoting a greater incentive for faster growth over the long run.
Providing constructive feedback to each staff member is one of the best ways to ensure a creative culture. Constructive criticism allows for high motivation while also moving the company in a good direction.
It has been shown that 90% of workers value honesty, trust, and fairness in their ideal work environment. Especially if your team is fully remote, fostering a workplace of creativity is of the utmost importance because you don’t get the “bump-ins” in the office which often airs out ideas that may be leaving an employee stuck.
3. Invest in Training and Processes
With information being so readily available through the internet, your competition has all the knowledge that you also have access to. This means you have to continually fight to maintain an edge over your competition.
The best way to maintain a competitive edge is by ensuring your employees know exactly what they need to do in each situation. Marketing and sales processes are incredibly important to improving the bottom line of your business. Once these are refined, revenues tend to grow much faster.
With smaller businesses, this is especially important because smaller businesses tend to hire younger graduates with an appetite to learn. If you are providing a fast pace work environment coupled with ample training it is very likely that your business will thrive and succeed.
Each workplace must support their novices and it is the role of upper management to create proper training and processes to make this happen.
4. Honest Leadership
Although highlighting quality leadership was the first point, it is so important to ensure that your management team, including you, are honest when dealing with employees.
Having honest leaders allows your team to feel that it is ok to have open conversations.
Gallup’s State Workplace report in 2017 highlighted how important having positive and engaged employees are to the success of the organization.
It emphasized that productivity increased by 17%, sales by 20% and the profitability by 21%. These are massive indicators that all contribute to creating the ideal work environment. If you still don’t think it’s important just look at the numbers. Your business will grow if you focus on creating a quality place for people to work.
5. Recognition and Reward of Hard Work
It sounds obvious but no one wants to put in a ton of time and effort to go unrecognized. The fastest and easiest way to build an ideal work environment is to reward someone when they have done something well.
Rewards are crucial for inducing encouragement of a certain form of behavior. This is known as ‘Positive Reinforcement’ when rewarding certain workers for their efforts it leads to a more motivated and hardworking workforce.
Rewards don’t have to be monetary like large bonuses. Many companies do small sweepstakes or have small trophies to reward people when they have done something well to show appreciation from the overall organization.
By rewarding hard work, the business sends out a message to their worker: “you are really valued by upper management and the owners!” When employee efforts are duly recognized, it creates a positive work atmosphere because everyone will realize that their extra efforts will not go unseen.
Ultimately it is up to the company make sure that they are creating the ideal work environment. Whether it is a remote work culture or an in-office one these five key focuses are what you should have in mind when building out your team and fostering an ideal work environment.
