Once upon a time, workplace managers frowned on the idea of employees socializing too much. This led to the infamous phrase workers love to hate: “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.”
Over time, though, good employers learned that employees socializing in small doses is a good thing. It helps with employee loyalty and retention and, most surprisingly, productivity. This is why many managers started creating different social opportunities for employees each month.
How, though, do social opportunities at work make employees more productive? Keep reading to discover the answers!
A Feeling of Camaraderie Promotes Productivity
It’s an open secret that employees work harder when they are more invested in a company. However, most workers don’t naturally become invested in the company itself. Instead, they become invested in their coworkers.
When employees experience feelings of belonging and camaraderie, they work harder because they know they aren’t just working for themselves. Such workers understand that when they do well, it also benefits the fellow employees they care about.
By creating more social opportunities at work, you help employees get to know one another. That creates the camaraderie and sense of belonging that helps them work that much harder.
Employees Naturally Learn More Skills from Fellow Employees
Managers teach employees new skills in order to enhance productivity. However, workers often dread these training sessions because they are either boring “sit and get” presentations from management or, even worse, lifeless, computer-based sessions.
Sometimes, the best way to get workers to learn new skills is to provide more social opportunities. That is because as the employees get to know each other, they will talk more about work and about how they approach different problems. In this way, your workers will get to know each other and learn useful skills they did not know before.
Best of all, this will happen in a “fun” context like a workplace party. Your workers will be grateful for the opportunity to socialize rather than resent an annoying training session.
Natural Team Building is a Bonus for Your Workplace
Team-building activities have become more prominent in recent years. One of the typical activities involves a “trust fall,” in which one worker falls backward and depends on other workers to catch him.
The idea behind this is simple: Employees who trust one another will work better together and be more productive. However, employees often resent these team-building activities for being arbitrary and more than a little weird. After all, what does falling backward have to do with, say, working in a call center?
When you provide social opportunities at work, though, it naturally builds a stronger team. That’s because your workers get to know each other as people rather than just fellow employees. Even as the team gets stronger, they will have more loyalty to the management providing these fun activities.
Fellowship Increases Employee Retention
Employee retention is a major concern for employers. After all, it costs a lot of time and money to replace employees, especially if they were good employees. Productivity suffers when you constantly have to replace your best employees each year.
Why do employees leave a job, though? Sometimes, they are just trying to get a better salary. However, the main factors that determine whether an employee leaves are their job satisfaction and their overall engagement.
By providing ample social opportunities at work, you can improve job satisfaction while boosting engagement. This will boost productivity for all workers while helping you seriously reduce employee turnover.
Give Workers More Agency for Company Buy-In
One of the biggest factors in worker satisfaction is how much agency they feel they have. If workers feel they have no say in the company, then their productivity will decline, and they become much likelier to find another job.
However, when done right, social opportunities are a perfect way to give workers more buy-in. For example, you can have parties and other informal events where you get employees’ ideas for the workplace.
These may be ideas for everything from the office layout to changing some of your sales scripts. By taking worker ideas and implementing those ideas, you give employees a greater sense of agency in the workplace. This will boost productivity in a powerful way.
A Fun Way to Highlight Employee Accomplishments
Another way to improve both employee productivity and retention is to highlight employee accomplishments. How you go about doing this makes a big difference.
For example, some employers highlight worker accomplishments in a group email or a company newsletter. However, just listing someone’s name and a brief description of their accomplishments in an email or newsletter workers may or may not read will not mean much to your employees.
It’s better to single employees out for their achievements in a public setting. This could include naming someone “salesman of the year” at a December Holiday or even creating a ceremony with physical trophies for different accomplishments. Employees seeking this kind of public praise will naturally become more productive.
Gamification: Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too
One of the ways to seamlessly blend social opportunities and employee productivity is gamification. As the name implies, this involves turning standard workplace responsibilities into a kind of game.
There are technological solutions to foster gamification. However, one of the simplest ways to gamify your office is to create little competitions throughout the week or month. For example, a competition for the most sales or the shortest average phone time in the office.
Such healthy competition encourages employees to socialize as they discuss the “game” and their own progress. On top of that, gamification helps make your workplace more fun and engaging, which boosts job satisfaction, retention, and productivity.
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Providing social opportunities at work is a great way to make employees more productive. But what if the perfect job opportunity for you was just a click away?
Here at Seguros Confie, we’ve mastered making the workplace fun and engaging. To see just how fun productivity can be, all you need to do is apply today!