The importance of treating your team well as a business owner has possibly never been more critical than it is now. 85% of people have stated that they are unhappy with their job, making for bleak reading if you employ many people in your teams. In the modern-day, you’re much more likely to leave if you don’t like your boss or don’t see room for growth within your role.
To make sure your team sticks with you and the company, you will need to form good relationships with your employees. It will help if you’re given room for professional development and growth and make sure that you get compensated for your work. This is sometimes easier said than done.
In this article, we will be exploring the benefits of treating your team well, how treating your team poorly can backfire on you, and how you can treat your team well to ensure the success of your business. It also forms the basis for treating our team at Driven Media Solutions.
The Benefits of Treating Your Team Well
One of the first reasons you should treat your team well is because they, not your emotional/work punching bags. So, if nothing else, you should treat them well to be a good person yourself, but there are tangible benefits to being a better and fairer boss.
Firstly, in simple terms, happier employees work harder. Quite a lot harder. A study commissioned and carried out by Oxford University discovered that happier workers achieve an average 13% increase in productivity than workers who are not satisfied with their jobs. So, from the outset, we can see that happier employees get more work done and will have a much more positive impact on the company’s bottom line than miserable employees.
Furthermore, suppose you and your company have a reputation for treating your employees well. In that case, you will be able to receive more positive reviews about working for your company on job board platforms like Indeed, which in turn will lead to you being able to attract more top-tier talent. This is because they will begin to see your company as a great place to work worthy of their abilities. Hiring better employees means that your business will perform better so long as you treat them well.
In addition to the above benefits, it may surprise you to know that happy employees can also lead to happier customers. When speaking to one of your employees, be it on the phone, in person, or over email, customers will be able to tell if the person they’re speaking to is unhappy and it will have a direct impact on the way that the customers perceive your business. Would you enjoy eating at a restaurant that has overworked and rude staff? Of course, you wouldn’t, you probably wouldn’t eat there again.
It may be surprising to think that the way you treat your employees can also have an impact on how they interact with each other. Despite this, it’s actually true that in a workplace where employees are getting stressed out by their bosses and working environment, they are more likely to have interpersonal conflicts with each other than they would be in a positive working environment. These interpersonal conflicts will have a hugely detrimental effect on your business.
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.