To have a positive workplace culture and to promote optimism within the business, clarity and communication is a must. If your staff doesn’t know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, or how any of it ever turns out, then you’re setting a bad tone.
Think about it for a second. How did you feel the last time you were given a task with very little direction? Or when you completed a project and were never informed of where it went or how it performed?
Odds are, you probably experienced a mixture of frustration, disgruntlement, and uneasiness. This is a special state of mind that, if experienced in long intervals and within large groups of people, will likely result in a workforce that only does the bare minimum and never has any strong connection to the work they do.
If you remove the frustration, disgruntlement, and uneasiness, you may not have a great, thriving, positive culture, but you’ll certainly be much further away from a negative one. And that’s always a good thing.
Here are a few tips to help you encourage more optimism and a little less negativity.
PROVIDE DIRECTION
If you ask someone to complete a task or a project, make sure you give them enough direction to actually complete the task or project as you expect them to complete it.
Some people with more aggressive, dominant personalities tend to pass this up altogether – not because they mean to. They simply don’t think about it. Because of this, it’s important to encourage open communication.
Make sure your employees know that it’s acceptable to ask for a little more direction. To minimize some of the back and forth, it can be worth your while to create detailed processes for more repetitive tasks.
GIVE MEANING
When you’re getting ready to make a big business decision or if you’re handing out projects to employees, you should always find the time to explain the ‘why’ behind it all.
Let your staff know why things are happening like they are or how a project fits into the bigger picture. It’s always nice to know that what you’re doing actually means something in the grand scheme of things.
SHOW RESULTS
If you spent weeks working on a big project and no one ever told you how things turned out, that’s a one-way ticket to zero motivation and no real connections to anything. Put something in place that allows employees to see the fruits of their labor.
You could go as far as to establish standard procedures for project follow-up, but even something as insignificant as a passing comment can have more of an impact than you might assume.
