The Working Environment – How it affects your employees’ mood

When it comes to the workplace, there are a number of things to consider in relation to ensuring your organisation is a great place to work – temperature, lighting, noise etc, but what makes a good working environment? Is there a way of getting employees to concentrate more and increase productivity without resorting to ping-pong tables and smoothie bars?

Different types of working environment

There are many types of workplaces ranging from offices to garages to restaurants so obviously all operate in different ways. Many factors that could be out of a business owners’ control can contribute to the way employees’ moods are affected within the workplace, such as disgruntled customers ringing up call centres to complain, unhappy diners moaning to the waitress about food arriving to the table cold or undercooked. Surely, these situations are going to result in the employee ‘having a bad day’ anyway.

Culture

What about call centres for example? Rows and rows of employees sat at a monitor with a telephone, only interacting with the people who ring them up with queries or to complain. Not conversing with the person sat next to them or ignoring the person behind them in the queue for the lift or the water cooler.  What can be done to ensure that people get along with their colleagues and don’t just come to work, do what they need to do and then go home?

Then there is the toxic working environment. The places where there is a clear divide between senior management and the ‘workers’, where them ‘at the top’ don’t care about the little people, as long as they get their salary at the end of the month. The places where there are one or two employees desperate for promotion and will bad mouth other colleagues in order to get what they want, or, even worse, gossip and spread rumours.

Main points to consider:-

• Effective induction – ensure employees are aware of health and safety requirements immediately they commence employment with the company, such as fire exits, assembly points and location of fire extinguishers and first aid boxes
• Introduction – take new employees round the organisation and make sure they know who their colleagues are and the main points of contact related to the role they will be doing
• Teamworking – encourage staff to assist within their department in order to meet deadlines
• Socialising – arrange departmental lunches or company work nights out where people get to talk to their colleagues about things other than work
• Adopt an open-door policy – get rid of the ‘them and us’ division
• Training and development – encourage learning new skills as a way of progressing within the company
• Personal improvement plans – tackle any problem employees with a plan for them to meet certain objectives

Should you require any further advice in relation to changing your working environment, we here at Breathing Space HR Ltd are experts and would be more than happy to help. Please contact our office on 0113 426 7735 or email admin@breathingspacehr.co.uk.