Traditionally, businesses were only concerned with issues such as product development, maximizing profit in an efficient way and so on. But today, employee happiness has increasingly become an important trait in a thriving business. According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review, salespeople who were happier, raised their sales by 37%. This is important because the happier people are within their job, the more satisfied they are said to be and by extension, more productive.
Let’s take a look at ways to promote employee happiness:

Fostering And Nurturing Relationships
Interpersonal relationships are important as friendships in general as it encourages and fosters wellness and extends life. A Gallup poll recently found that when people have close relationships with their colleagues at work, their satisfaction with their job increases by 50%.
Businesses should therefore initiate the engagement of interpersonal work activities in order to create better relationships among staff members. This could be through social activities such as luncheons or picnics. Team-building training exercises should also be initiated within the office, which would help the employees and their coworkers alike, to understand how to better work with each other in a relaxed atmosphere.

Reducing Stress
Much of the stress that employees perceive that are management related are directly related to management style. An autocratic and inflexible management style can lead to staff feeling as though they have no control over their work, that they are blamed when things go wrong and that there is no support for them to develop their skills or career. A study by the University of Wisconsin found that happy people developed 50% more antibodies to the flu vaccine, therefore, the happiest employees took one-tenth the sick leave of their least happiest colleagues.

Promoting A Healthy Work/Life Balance
In this day and age, people find it hard to ‘switch off’ and genuinely rest, and in turn, with remote working technology, people are expected to be ‘on-call’ at all times, without being allowed to have a life outside of work. But, people want downtime, as well as a job that recognizes and supports so that their life continues when they have left the office.

If you focus on keeping your workforce happy, productivity levels will increase and employee turnover rate will also eventually decrease.

Promoting Career and Personal Development
Providing development opportunities shows that you’re willing to invest in them as a person as well as their future. If they feel as though their future is bright within your organization and that your organization actively supports and helps pave a path towards upward mobility, this support will show that you are just as committed to your employees as you hope they would be to you!

Happiness in the workplace is important as a business is essentially nothing without happy and productive employees. Since your employees are a direct representation of your business, if they’re not happy, it’s highly likely that your customers won’t be happy either.