People are the heart and souls of any business and any entrepreneur needs to know how to keep the team spirit and the efficiency levels high. Here’s what you have to do as a business owner so that the productivity levels of your employees are high while also maintaining a healthy and optimistic mood.
Management consultants tend to place a lot of emphasis on corporate culture. What is corporate culture? According to Investopedia, corporate culture is “The beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company’s employees and management interact and handle outside business transactions. Often, corporate culture is implied, not expressly defined, and develops organically over time from the cumulative traits of the people the company hires. A company’s culture will be reflected in its dress code, business hours, office setup, employee benefits, turnover, hiring decisions, treatment of clients, client satisfaction and every other aspect of operations.”
However, only a handful of large companies actually have corporate cultures. In the case of small companies such as start-ups, they haven’t been around for a long time to develop a culture, nor possess the necessary human resources to create one. Rather, small companies need to focus on just as important feature: “team morale”.
From what I’ve learned, team mood arises mainly from the behavior and attitude of the team’s leadership. If leaders will show an upbeat attitude, each member of the team will become more optimistic and believe much more in the success of the company. So with that in mind, let’s process to 5 great ways of creating a positive mood for your team:
1. Smile more than you’d normally do
According to the latest neuroscience studies, smiling improves your mood given the fact that it sends signals to your brain, telling it you are happy, even when your thoughts are rather grim. Moreover, recent research found that leaders who smile more often are more successful than those who don’t.
2.Create an upbeat environment. Avoid at all cost creating a depressing environment with your standard cubicles. Go the extra mile and create an office that has a great feel to it and a personality. The good news is that this option will not cost you a lot of cash but will have a tremendous effect over your team.
3. Be careful who you hire. Not hiring jerks is a must and probably one of the most common things when hiring is concerned. Still, it bears repeating because hiring a jerk into a start-up is pretty easy, especially if that jerk possesses some crucial technical skills.
Avoid this at all cost. Regardless of how talented that person may be, it’s not worth it. Large companies have the advantage and possibility of tolerating a couple jerks here and there because their company culture runs on autopilot. At the same time, if you made a mistake, don’t be afraid to fire that person: it may not be the most pleasant activity of an entrepreneur, but it is part of the deal.
On the other hand, in a start-up, where you have a small number of employees, all you need is one person with a terrible attitude and the corporate mood is ruined. Pointless to say, don’t act like a jerk yourself!
4. Celebrate early and as often as possible. In my opinion, this is a huge deal. Rather than waiting to throw a big party until the product becomes successful, in a start-up you need to celebrate success as often as needed and possible.
It’s not only about having fun, but rather about creating interaction between people on different parts of the project. During these types of meetings, ideas tend to come out of nowhere. Later some of them can even be successfully implemented.
5. Cultivate your inner optimist. While some people are optimists by nature, others have to continuously work on it. If you’re a person that oozes optimism, it’s bound to happen that some if not all of your employees will be contaminated with it. Therefore, working on it will pay off sooner rather than later.
And while none of the aforementioned ideas are all that innovative, don’t fret because creating a positive corporate mood isn’t rocket science, so it’s all up to you to create a business environment for you and your team to enjoy working in.
