Most full-time employees spend more time with their co-workers than they do with their families and friends. With this in mind, it is essential that time is spent in creating quality relationships with co-workers in order to make sure that all this time spent with them is seen as more of a positive than an negative.
Relationships with co-workers can be built through casual social gatherings outside as well as within working hours. There are numerous advantages to doing this as improving working relationships improves team moral and happiness in the workplace.
What are main benefits of having good relationships with co-workers?
Improved Teamwork and Collaboration
When individuals develop better relationships, they instantly become more productive together. This is why creating good functioning teams in the workplace can be difficult as if you simply toss employees together into a venture, it can take some effort for them to break the ice and start to function and communicate well as a team. Whereas if you start a venture with employees that you already know have a good working relationship together you are likely to achieve far better productivity in a shorter amount of time.
Improved Employee Morale
Given how much time workers spend in each other’s presence, the improvement of a good working environment by developing better relationships can bring more enjoyment to the experience an subsequently improve moral. Teams that invest energy in getting to know each other while they carry out their responsibilities will have a much more favourable experience than those who sit in silence. Having this positive relationship in your team will help improve its spirit and create better output as communication and ideas are voiced more.
Higher Employee Retention Rates
When an employee feels like they belong in within the organisation, regardless of whether it is due to them believing in the goals of the company or they simply feel part of a family, they will be significantly less likely to look elsewhere and will remain loyal to you.
Expanded Employee Productivity
All these components result in one basic outcome: happy workers are productive workers. By and large, while you may have a few issues with employees who take the notion of talking with their co-workers as a way of sitting around idly and not doing much work the benefits have proven to far outweigh these isolated incidents as a happy a workforce is proven to be a profitable one. By feeling progressively associated with their working environment, workers are more likely to invest more energy to help the company grow to it’s full potential.