The importance of treating your team well as a business owner has possibly never been more critical than it is now. Studies show that a significant majority of employees are unhappy in their jobs and in today’s job market, people are far more willing to leave if they don’t feel valued by their employer or don’t see opportunities for growth.
To ensure your team stays committed to you and your company, you need to foster strong relationships with your employees. This means providing genuine opportunities for professional development and fair compensation for their contribution. While this might sound straightforward, it’s often more challenging in practice. This article explores the many benefits of treating your team well, illustrates how poor treatment can harm your organisation, and offers practical steps to build a supportive, motivated workforce.
The Benefits of Treating Your Team Well
One fundamental reason to treat your team well is simple basic respect your employees are people first, not emotional or work “punching bags.” But beyond being a decent human being, there are very real business advantages to nurturing a positive working environment.
Happier employees are more productive: research suggests that satisfied workers can be up to 13% more productive than those who are disengaged or unhappy. This boost in productivity can significantly improve your company’s performance and profitability.
When your company gains a reputation for valuing its people, you’ll attract higher-quality applicants. Potential hires increasingly research employer reviews on platforms like Indeed before applying, and positive feedback about workplace culture can make your business stand out in a competitive talent market.
Happy teams also benefit your customers. When employees feel engaged and appreciated, they convey that positivity to clients, whether in person, by phone, or online and customer satisfaction often improves as a result. In contrast, unhappy or stressed employees can harm customer perceptions of your brand.
Additionally, fostering a supportive work environment encourages collaboration and reduces internal conflicts. A team that trusts its leaders and peers is better equipped to solve problems together and contribute to ongoing organisational success.
The Consequences of Treating Your Team Poorly
Now that we’ve covered the benefits of treating your team well, it’s only right that we go over the consequences of treating your team poorly. We could simply summarise it by telling you that your business will suffer and that things won’t run as smoothly, but a bit of context never hurts anyone.
Firstly, as mentioned previously in the article, employees are more likely to leave your company if they’re not being treated right, but what’s the cost of an employee leaving your company and you having to hire somebody else? Well, working on a salary of £27,600 for a new employee and factoring in all the additional costs, such as training, HR and potential bonuses can end up costing your company much closer to a figure of £50,000. So, as can be seen, it would be a lot more cost-effective to simply attempt to hold onto your existing employees.
Not only will treating your employees poorly damage you financially in the aspect of gaining new hires, but your employees leaving your company can have negative impacts in other ways. For example, if an employee leaves you and goes to join one of your competitors, your competitor may get access to that employee’s specialist knowledge, their clients and insights on how to improve their own business model, which can eat into your market share. Including a Post-Termination Restrictive Covenant can still make the affair messy and expensive, so it’s better to just treat your employees well.
In extreme circumstances, treating your employees really badly can result in your business being exposed to a lawsuit. For example, when Employment Tribunal costs for claimants were scrapped by the Supreme Court in 2017, such claims increased in volume by 130% by the following year. This shows that scorned employees are not scared to take their employees to court and this can incur massive costs to your business. The highest win for an unfair dismissal claim in the UK during 2020 cost £118,842 and the average for these wins sits at around £6,000, which is still a large expense.
It is also important to treat potential candidates for your company with respect, or else you’ll risk negative publicity for your efforts. Only 19% of people would remain a customer of a company that treated them poorly during an interview, with 48% saying they’d encourage others to stop using that company’s service. 25% of these people say they would go even further and share their experience on social media, which will definitely open your company up to a lot of bad publicity that could affect your operations.
How To Treat Your Team Well
It’s Not All About The Money
It’s an incredibly outdated and archaic point of view that employees will simply stay with your company if you pay them exceedingly well. It is true that employees will have grievances if they’re being underpaid or not being compensated well for the value that they bring to the company, but there is a point where money will stop being an effective motivator.
In truth, once you are paying an employee well enough for their material needs to be met, you will need to begin focusing on other aspects to ensure that they stay motivated, productive and happy. Doing so will help your organisation to improve its bottom line, without sacrificing happiness.
Ask For Employee Feedback
This is one of the best ways to go about beginning to improve the way you treat your employees. One of the best ways to do this is to send out an anonymous employee survey, with some questions on what they think is going well in the business and also offer them the opportunity to speak about what they think might not be going so well. It is important for you to ensure that these surveys are completely anonymous and the only information you should get from the employee is information on which department they work in. Of course, if there is only one person in a department, skip that.
Once you have received the feedback from your employees, you should then explore the possibility of implementing any suggested changes into your organisation. After this, it’s a case of communicating the upcoming changes with your team, be that in a meeting or through an email. Employees will appreciate that their feedback has led to changes, or has been listened to, which will improve motivation.
Encourage Socialising
It may be shocking to hear that in some workplaces, socialising is incredibly frowned upon. Of course, if two people are having a conversation throughout their entire shift, you should probably act on it, but a minute or two of small talk isn’t too bad. Despite this, it is actually in your best interests to encourage your employees to socialise with each other and develop deeper bonds.
One of the first reasons that you should encourage socialising is that when people like their teammates and coworkers, they’re more likely to be able to collaborate effectively and produce quality work. This is because there is an implied level of trust and psychological safety where these groups won’t feel like they can’t contribute to the project.
Another reason that you should encourage your employees to socialise and become comfortable with each other is that it actually makes employees less likely to leave your company. Sometimes, it can be hard to make friends in the workplace, and if someone is getting paid well and has a lot of social connections at work, it can be challenging to leave that behind, especially if there isn’t a significant driver for them to do so.
Implement Helpful Employee Benefits
We’ve all heard about the way in which companies highlight employee benefits that are actually comical with slides for employees, pool tables and such other things that might be nice at first, but don’t actually help the employee or give them an incentive to stay at your company in the long run. If you’re going to give employees benefits then it would probably be better if you offer ones that are helpful, down below are some examples that you may be able to implement for your teams.
- Generous Employee Discounts
- Stock and Share Options
- Assistance With Childcare
- Healthcare Benefits
- Accredited Training Courses
- REAL Advancement Opportunities
- Additional Paid Holiday
By implementing some of the above employee benefits into your company, you may find that your employees are happier in their role, knowing that they have an employer that will go the extra mile for their teams. It will be a better environment for employees when they know they can go on a course that will help them in their career, or if they don’t have to worry about making arrangements for child care to stay in their job.
Be Understanding of Personal Issues
This is possibly one of the most important aspects of treating your employees well. Everyone has a time in their life when things just won’t stop going wrong and statistics show that a quarter of people suffer from mental health problems at some point in their lives. Work shouldn’t be an additional stress to someone who is already going through a seriously tough time.
There are many methods to ensure your business equips itself to help employees with mental health/personal issues. An example is to have your management team undergo Mental Health First Aid Training. The training will help your team to be able to notice the signs of mental health issues. It will also help them understand what things may trigger them in employees; this will help to make sure that your company can minimise stress for employees.
Aside from Mental Health First Aid Training, employees may come to you with personal issues that they have been having. It’s essential to make sure you listen to them and attempt to offer an appropriate support level. Whether it be time off without repercussions, workplace adjustments, or just someone to talk to. You should always treat mental health with the same level of care as physical illnesses.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve read this article you should understand the importance of treating your team well. This is supported by the benefits of doing so and the consequences of treating your employees poorly. You now have an understanding of some of the techniques that you can use within your organisation. These include ways to improve employee wellbeing and overall productivity.