Are you an entrepreneur or a manager? If yes, apply these five ways to create a great working environment and your employees will be the happiest people in the world.
The results you will get? Loyalty, Innovation, Hard work, Fulfillment, Impact, Revenue Growth. And not only: the most important is turning your employees into entrepreneurs that will help your company grow even more.
Vishen Lakhiani, the co-founder of Mindvalley, a company that promotes personal growth authors, is also a motivational speaker. In this TEDx talk he tells us what are the 5 key ingredients that turned Mindvalley to be one of the best workplaces in the world. Any company can apply these principles and watch how the business transforms.
I made a quick summary of the 5 ways to build a great workplace:
1. Create happiness
- create a beautiful workplace and give employees freedom to use this space in any way they want
- give flexible time and let employees chose their own working hours as long as the work gets done
- recruit happy people, that socialize, allow them to make friends with colleagues like this they will enjoy their time at work even more
- make people enjoy the weekly team meeting (that normally is boring) – transform the team meeting, make it fun and give your employees appreciation during this meeting
- give your employees freedom and power – let them control their own workspace and they will come out with great ideas
- give them the possibility to ask questions and express concerns
- link work and play – work will be fun and productive if you make it playful.
2. Noble mission
- chose a noble mission for your company and share it with your employees
- the idea that someday they will make a difference in the world by working inside your company motivates them. It’s the reason to wake up in the morning and jump out of bed to come to work.
3. Quests
- encourage your employees to discover and do more in their day to day tasks by creating a system of growing, moving from one level to another like in games (“gamification of work”)
- give superheroes badges when they complete an important task or project
- when they do something bold, outstanding and have a great result or idea give them recognition by leveling up
- use scores to sum up their performances
- let employees chose their own top performers and praise them publicly, encourage them to send notes of appreciation between them
- create a system of taking the entire team out of the routine: spontaneous events, festivals, treats, parties, meetings, weird beautiful things that are created by the employees themselves: “weirdness in the workplace is a wonderful way to create happiness”.
4. Personal growth
- allow and encourage your employees to grow at work
- in his team, Vishen applied the 45/5 workweek – everybody works for 45 hours a week, but 5 hours of those paid hours are for personal development (people can read a book, attend a training, meditate, discuss etc)
- allow budget for your employees to attend trainings, buy books, go on a team retreat
- know what your employees want in personal growth: ask them what skills they want to develop, what trainings they want to attend, how they want to contribute to the world, what new experience they want to live, what opportunities they see ahead.
5. Tribal dynamics
- create and let your employees help in creating a team identity, team culture
- use code of language, values, enthusiasm and transfer this also to your clients and partners.
All of the things above might seem hard to do but they are actually easy. Once you started with one, another one comes quite easy and after you created the culture in a way to focus on happiness you will see that the rest of the ideas and ways to enhance this culture will come from your employees. As Vishen said in another of his talks: “happiness is the new productivity”.
70% of our awake hours are spend at work, why not make these hours happier?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jHLm5Lne3D0]
