Here’s How You Can Make Your Company a Great Place to Work

It is no secret that employee retention is almost as critical to business as customer retention. Just as it costs far more to onboard a new customer than keep an existing one, keeping your employees happy and comfortable staying with your company can drastically reduce your overhead. Many employers think that keeping employees happy means offering expensive perks and benefits packages. While those certainly don’t hurt, they are not always the most critical aspects of employee retention. Creating a great environment for them to work in is often just as, if not more, important. Here are three rock solid ways you can turn your company into a great place to work.

Trust Your People

By now we’ve all heard of “soft skills” and the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace. Sometimes your best employees will possess skills that can’t be listed on a resume or tested in a standardized test. You might think of trust as a “soft benefit,” one that many companies are discovering the great importance of. When you give an employee a job, trust them to make it happen. Let them do it in their own way and trust them to find a way that works best for them. An employee that feels empowered to do their job without needless restrictions can take personal pride in their work. That personal connection with the job often produces higher quality work and a happier employee.

Create a Great Space

Before you sit down with an office space designer like D&R Office Works to lay out your new office space or redo your current one, get your employee’s input on what they want. While open floor plans may be all the rage and may save space and money, people still need private space during the workday, so make sure they have it. Similarly, having only private spaces for employees can get in the way of collaboration, communication, and maintaining a sociable workspace. Most office layout solutions will be a sort of middle ground, and that’s ok. Lastly, don’t get too hung up on the look of the office. As long as your employees have a comfortable, functional place to work, aesthetic appeal is just icing on the cake.

Minimize Meetings

There is probably no greater time waster or more frustrating event for employees than a useless meeting. Sadly, we seem to have developed a “meeting culture” in America and many employees find themselves attending so many meetings they have to work late just to get their tasks done. While you may not be able to eliminate meetings entirely, you should always do what you can to make the ones you do have efficient. This can mean anything from putting extra work into meeting preparations to creating succinct emails or slideshows that can be viewed individually. If you must have meetings, make them important and worthwhile for your employees.

Being a great place for employees to work will go a long way towards keeping them and cutting down on overhead. Creating a great place to work, however, involves far more than just picking out cool furniture and amenities—although that is important too. Some of the most important benefits can’t be bought or have a dollar amount placed on them. They just have to be given and experienced.

Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most her time hiking, biking and gardening. For more information contact Brooke via Twitter @BrookeChaplan.