Healthy Happy Workers Are Engaged Workers – Here’s How You Can Do This

Healthy, happy workers are more likely to be engaged in their work, more productive and take fewer sick days. Therefore, creating a workplace that helps your staff feel like their work has meaning, helps both them and the company.

Here is our guide for ways you can create more engaged workers in your business.

Learning and Development

Having a learning and development plan for your staff will help them feel valued in their role. It will also make them better at their jobs and increase their productivity.

Not all companies have formal learning and development plans but a good place to start is where your staff need extra support with their skills and experience.

For example, if you have a team member who has leadership potential, finding them the right leadership training will mean they are ready for the promotion before the opportunity is available.

Or you might want to keep your team up to date with the latest technology, which means training on platforms and constant improvement.

Yet, learning does not have to stop at skills. Having a learning culture in place in your company will help your staff see there are more opportunities available to them to develop themselves. Learning may instead be about how your teams communicate with each other. Or how they can best combine their expertise to be more productive.

Overall, you should look at learning and development on both an individual and a team level to get the best out of them.

Show the Career Opportunities

Your staff want to know that they have opportunities to progress within the company or you’re at risk of losing talent. Discussing the career opportunities on a regular basis with staff will help them understand what’s available to them.

This will also help your employees make a plan to reach their career goals. We all know that the career ladder is not so straightforward. Some staff may take side steps or transfer their skills across departments. By talking about the different career journeys they can take, you’ll help your staff see what’s possible. And when they can see the opportunities, they’ll be more engaged workers during the journey to get there.

Engage in Social Activities

Engagement at work is also about looking at the person as a whole. When you create opportunities for social activities, you help your teams form stronger bonds.

Social activities can form weekly or monthly groups, like a book club or sports team. Or they can come in the form of away days. These kinds of activities show your teams that the business cares about them as a person, rather than solely for the work they do.

People who form strong bonds with work colleagues are less likely to leave and more likely to find value in their work.

Offer Flexible Working

“Job seekers want flexibility, community – and good parking! Focusing on employee engagement can help create better workplace culture, reduce staff turnover, increase productivity and provide greater job satisfaction.” Explains Glassdoor’s Lauren Thompson.

For many people, working from home over the past two years has been a positive experience. For others, they miss the office atmosphere. Offering flexible working options will help you attract and retain the best talent. While many employees don’t want to work from home full time, many do enjoy the option of not commuting to an office every day.

This is about finding the right balance and communicating your flexible working policy so that your staff are aware.

Develop a Positive Work Culture

Company culture is increasingly important to staff. Working in an environment where they can experiment and test their creative ideas creates a psychologically safe workplace. Developing a diverse team will also help embed a positive work culture and will increase ideas and perspectives within the business.

Positive work culture will also reduce the stress within the team – and therefore the risk of sick days. Plus, a positive work culture encourages collaborations, which in turn increases morale. Employees are more likely to feel loyalty for a company that they are positive towards and this all comes down to the culture you embed.

Changing or nudging company culture is hard work and takes time, but it is worth it in the long term.

Making sure your staff are engaged takes continuous action but the benefits for the business are significant. You can measure how well your staff are engaged by tracking sick days, stress levels, and productivity.