Help your employees… Fall back in love with the workplace

Not many of us can pull off an office slide or crazy workplace perks to keep our employees inspired. But although we may not be a Google or a Facebook, small organisations still have plenty to offer.

So whether you’re looking to wake your colleagues up with some inspiring office ideas, or merely wish to encourage a more positive workplace mindset, here are our tips on helping your employees fall back in love with the office.

Support employee wellness

Benefits are not only a great way of drawing new recruits into your organisation, but also of helping your long-serving employees feel contented and valued.

Firstly, think about your workplace and what your people really need to make a difference to their wellbeing.

For example, if you’re a software provider like us, there’s a good chance your employees will be looking into a computer screen for the majority of the day. So, we offer to pay for our employees’ eye tests, as well as some of the cost toward new glasses, if they need them for screen work.

We also know that it can be difficult to make time for exercise in a nine to five role, and that being an office-worker inherently leads to being sat down for hours at a time. The gym subsidy we offer contributes towards a gym membership, to encourage staff to get active and stay mindful of their wellbeing.

Here at Hireserve we also offer a Summer Club benefit to help our working parents cope with the strain that school holidays can bring.

These benefits work well for us because they’re tailored to our workforce, but you may require a totally different set of perks to benefit your staff. And if you’re an SME like us, you’ll need to be a little inventive with what you offer.

Flexible working

Summertime can be a particularly challenging time for working parents, as well as SMEs that might need to run on a shorter-than-normal staff.

One way to help both parties is to offer your employees agile working opportunities. Can your staff work from home, or be flexible with the hours they work?

We’ve written extensively on other ways agile working can benefit both you and your employees:

Take a look at this guest blog by Chloe Jessamy, which explores how flexibility could benefit both your employees and your business; examine the statistics surrounding flexible working and the effect it has on employee wellbeing; read how Phil, our very own Junior Database Developer, personally benefited from flexible working.

Wellbeing in the workplace

Simple changes to your employees’ working environment could inspire a renewed love for their time in the office.

For example, are their laptops positioned correctly? Do their chairs support a healthy posture? Are they staying hydrated and taking regular breaks?

Performing a workstation assessment and reminding your employees of some wellbeing tips and tricks could really improve their mindset and health at work.

To start the New Year with a bang, we hosted a ‘workplace wellbeing’ day in January. We brought in a massage therapist to offer 15-minute treatments to team members (which helped relax and revive them), provided healthy snacks for the office, and put up posters describing the little changes we can make to transform our working day (like how often to take short breaks away from our screens).

Here’s some of the feedback we received:

“I thought it was a great day”  | “There was a real buzz in the office”  | “It was something a little different – miles away from mundane!” 

Diversity of work

Sometimes, a small change of scenery can make all the difference.

Reinvigorate your staff by offering a pro-bono project to work on, like we did with the Volunteer Pool, or a community or charity initiative to get involved with.

Working on a wide range of projects and allowing staff to learn and hone a variety of skills will encourage a renewed interest in their roles and an awakened sense of workplace fulfilment.

Whilst Mark Zuckerberg might yawn at the prospect of working within an SME like ours, there are practical ways we can change the environment, the benefits and the projects we work on to help staff fall back in love with the workplace.