Building a more engaged, high-results staff could require a shift in traditional ideas about where, when, and how the workday should unfold. To help your team achieve improved outcomes and have less stress doing it, focus on three almost effortless improvements to the modern workplace: Movement, mindfulness, and motivation are how you can increase employee productivity and enhance your team’s everyday experience at work.
We all want a workplace that’s humming with lucrative activity and happy, fulfilled co-workers. Even though there is clear evidence that an employee’s happy outlook directly correlates to output, we too often think more about the money and the busy-busy activity than we do the engaged employee. This lopsided thinking has done productivity no favors. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity in Florida grew by only 0.6 percent in 2019, even with Floridians working longer hours and taking fewer vacation days.
In a competitive global market, this just won’t do. Successful organizations integrate holistic elements of personal, physical, and professional well-being into the workplace to recruit and retain top talent, maintain employee engagement, and boost both productivity and profit.
How can you make holistic upgrades to your productivity paradigm? Keep it simple and keep it focused on just three elements proven to positively affect employee’s day-to-day and long-term workplace experience: movement, mindfulness, and motivation.
It is no news to you that long stretches of uninterrupted slouching at your laptop can cause significant health effects, none of them good: cardiovascular conditions, obesity, diabetes, and depression. Hardly an experience that nurtures a happy, highly productive employee.
To combat the toll on health and emotions, many organizations now offer standing desks, fitness incentives on their health care plans, and access to workout equipment. A state-of-the-art gym with free all-day spin classes would be a phenomenal perk, but adding movement to your employees’ work life does not have to break your company’s budget. It can be quite inexpensive to tweak your culture so that movement is the norm, physical fitness is encouraged, and the desk is not the only location for getting work done.
Mindfulness is the art of paying attention, turning off criticism to observe and be present. It can be a formal practice, or it can be simply an internalized habit of managing your interaction with the world and the stress of your workplace. It seems a little counterintuitive that decompressing and clearing your thoughts could improve your productivity, but research suggests that just 15 minutes of meditation can lead to better business decisions.
What’s more, mindfulness encourages focus, empathy, and creativity, which lends itself to a more satisfied workforce. To formalize the practice as part of your company culture, management could show its commitment to mindfulness by modeling the behavior and also by offering training sessions for the team. Happily, anyone can “do” mindfulness right now, even in the middle of a busy office, by adding be-present elements throughout the day.
No matter how intrinsically motivated a team member might be, your organization can create conditions to elevate motivation and, in turn, drive productivity. In other words, the annual review and cost-of-living raise won’t cut it. Motivating staff takes some creativity, continual encouragement, and ongoing positive reinforcement.
Offering development courses to your employees is powerful motivation for individual team members, but it also benefits your bottom line, customers, management, and staff as a whole. When you add professional training with USF to your employment package, you boost your team’s collective knowledge and expertise, attract career-focused job candidates, and build enthusiasm for and loyalty to your organization.