Making your employees feel comfortable at work is an essential component of cultivating a good working environment. Your employees must, at all times, feel comfortable, both physically and mentally.
There are many ways that you can ensure a sense of comfort in your workplace, and this page will tell you a few of those. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more now than ever, your employees must feel at ease in their workplace, lest they refuse to come in for fear of contracting the coronavirus. You should invest as much time as you can set aside into creating a comfortable working environment for your employees, as a comfortable working environment is conducive to a better quality of work.
Here are some tips to make sure that your employees feel comfortable at work.
Lumbar Support Chairs
Perhaps the most obvious mode of comfort is comfier chairs. While not a deterrent to viral spread, lumbar support chars can reduce your employee’s stress in the workplace. The chair manufacturers from ErgoEdge.co agree with this sentiment and stress the importance of lumbar support chairs. By providing your employees with a chair that takes the stress off their back, they will be able to focus on their work and become more efficient and effective employees.
Personal Protective Equipment
As referenced in the introduction, safeguarding measures against coronavirus can help your employees feel more comfortable. And, while it will not provide physical comfort, in fact, quite the opposite, it will give them the peace of mind necessary to continue as they were before the pandemic started. Personal protective equipment ranges from masks to full facial coverings and encompasses gloves and many other things. Enforcing personal protective equipment upon your employees may seem totalitarian at first, but it will surely benefit them and be appreciated in the long term. At the very minimum, your employees should wear gloves and masks all day.
Providing them with masks and gloves will be a good way to make them feel comfortable, as if they have to constantly go out and buy personal protective equipment (which can be expensive), they may grow contemptuous of the whole idea and search for other work. Personal protective equipment protects everybody and must not be ignored. It is an absolute necessity and a crucial component of fighting viral transmission.
Hand Sanitizer
Continuing with the anti-viral transmission line of comfort, you should also distribute hand sanitizer among your employees for when they come into the building and leave. They can apply the hand sanitizer over the top of their gloves, or directly to their hands and put the gloves back on. Gloves can still be a transmission method, especially if employees touch their faces with gloves on. By applying hand sanitizer to both their hands and their gloves, they can be certain that they are not carrying any viruses or transmitting them unknowingly to their fellow employees.
Social Distancing
Social distancing has been largely abolished by our governments, yet even so, notwithstanding the legality behind it, you should and can enforce it in your workplace. Enforcing social distancing is a great measure to keep people happy and comfortable; the COVID-19 pandemic has seen weeks of isolation, and now, strangely, human contact seems abstract and foreign to us. Your employees will be delighted to not have to have direct human contact and to be allowed to maintain a two-meter distance between them and their co-workers, thereby keeping everybody safe and preventing further viral transmission.
Coffee Room
Moving away from protective and preventative measures to just plain old comfort, another way to ensure your employees’ comfort is to set aside a coffee room that doubles as a reflective zone. When you are stressed out at work, the best cure is often a cup o’ Joe. Having access to a coffee room (and free coffee, of course) can be a wonderful way to alleviate any stress or burdensome emotions your employees may be suffering from. Some offices in Japan have doubled their coffee rooms as meditative spaces, wherein no noise can be made, which is certainly another great and ingenious solution to circumventing employee stress.
Positivity
A positive working environment is a comfortable one. As best you can, try to shed the stress associated with professional working environments, while still maintaining an air of professionalism. Be understanding but firm. A positive working environment is one of your employees who will never want to leave. This can help you to retain employees for many years.
Now you know a few ways, traditional and not, of promoting a comfortable, familiar, and friendly working environment. Your employees deserve comfort at the very least, as they will undoubtedly be an important cog in the wider machine that pays your bills! Try to implement some of the measures and see if they work for you, as they have for many others.
