How to foster a healthy workplace climate

Our careers take up a significant part of our daily activity; in fact, we will spend more than 80,000 hours working over the course of our lives! It’s no surprise, then, that loving your job helps you stay motivated at work. Maintaining quality relationships with our colleagues is essential to everyone’s job satisfaction, which can have a major impact on mental health.

The benefits of a strong organizational climate

Workplace climate, or organizational climate, is our perception of our work environment.

For employees, there are many benefits to a strong workplace climate, such as:

• Inspiring commitment and motivation
• Improving job satisfaction and wellbeing at work
• Reducing stress
• Promoting good communication
• Fostering creativity and innovation

For employers, the benefits of a healthy climate are just as promising. These include:

• Ensuring employee stability
• Attracting new candidates
• Improving efficiency and efficacy
• Positively influencing productivity and flexibility in the face of change
• Encouraging results

Maintaining good relationships within their teams is a win-win situation for employees, employers and managers alike! All company stakeholders have a role to play in cultivating a climate in which everyone’s wellbeing is nurtured.

Work atmosphere for employee retention

Workplace climate is now as much an essential part of working conditions as flexibility, work-life balance and salary. It’s one of the things a new hire will notice on their first day of work!

Employee retention is one of the main challenges for employers today. In the context of a labour shortage, workplace climate plays a key role, since employees who are happy at work are more loyal, absent less often and improve the organization’s performance and productivity.

Three tips to maintaining a pleasant workplace climate

Whether it’s by making small gestures, paying attention or having a positive attitude, there are many ways to help maintain cohesion at work! Here are three things that can help prevent a toxic environment:

1. Encourage communication

Talking to each other—obvious, right? Yet it’s so important! Talking shop is one thing, but it’s key to take the time to get to know each other as people, too. Building bonds between colleagues helps ensure strong communication, whatever the situation may be.

Pro tip: If you’re experiencing conflict, discomfort or embarrassment with a coworker or manager, don’t be afraid to tell them how you feel. Expressing constructive criticism, feelings and worries are always welcome, as long as they’re respectful.

2. Foster a tight-knit team

A happy hour every now and then, an improvised lunch between meetings, a Holiday party: having fun as a team is crucial for building trust and a sense of belonging. The resulting cohesion promotes teamwork, engagement and performance.

3. Focus on recognition

Recognition can come from both colleagues and managers. It’s one way to encourage stakeholders and to develop a sense of belonging in the company and team.

Positive feedback improves motivation and pride in employees, who will, as a result, be even more driven to go above and beyond in their roles. You can practise acknowledgment through internal communication channels, during a team meeting, by sharing someone’s good deed with management or simply by verbally crediting the individual in question.

Healthy employees

A work atmosphere is greatly enhanced by both physically and mentally healthy employees. Nobody is immune to burnout or depression. By relieving pressure at work, employers help to reduce stress.

But since the unexpected can always happen, a solid group insurance plan allows you to protect your employees in case of illness.

How to promote a pleasant workplace climate as an employer

Since all stakeholders influence the atmosphere at work, employers can implement different elements to create a healthy organizational climate. These include:

• Treating employees fairly and equitably to instill a sense of justice in the team
• Asking for advice before making certain decisions
• Noticing little but meaningful things
• Making yourself available

With telework, manager accessibility, team cohesion and communication have become more vital than ever. Although the world of work is changing fast, interpersonal relationships remain at the heart of a company’s success! And that’s what we practise every day at iA Financial Group, from the very beginning of the hiring process.