A healthy work environment starts with the business philosophy of the top leaders.

The reason why many businesses have such a poor work environment has to do with the way they think people need to be managed. This is often through a top-down style where strategies, plans, processes, and problems are dealt with at the top and then disseminated.

To ensure that the employees give their fullest, they set individual goals and evaluate and rank the employees once a year. The employees are thus reduced to human resources, just like machine resources or capital resources.

This creates a distance between the employees and the company. It creates fear of ranking too low and potentially losing your job.

How to create a healthy work environment?

You start with a totally different mindset and philosophy. With a few exceptions, everyone would like to contribute and be engaged. So how do you get people engaged?

Remove all those factors that instill fear and that create learned helplessness. You start with sharing your vision of a healthy workplace where employees have no fear and where cooperation and support are the norms. Get an Adjustable Computer Desk for better ergonomics here.

You tell the employees that whoever cooperates towards that vision will not be made redundant, even when their current role/work might no longer be needed. A different position will be found, especially since you know that once this vision becomes reality, a lot of problems will disappear and the lead times will be reduced, leading to faster delivery and lower cost, which in turn leads to a better market position and increased sales.

You train the employees and management on how to do root cause analysis in a structured way. To never blame anyone, but to always blame the processes for not catching the problem beforehand.

You stop giving employees or departments individual goals, as this would lead to point improvements. Point improvements seldom improve the overall company performance and often lead to poorer overall performance.

You closely coach each employee at least once a month, but preferably more often. In these one-on-one meetings, you ask them how things are going, what they are struggling with and together you work towards a solution by improving the workflow, processes, and procedures. Training can be part of that, but more often than not, training is just covering problems in the workflow, processes, and procedures.

Even strategic problems are brought down to the employees, as they have the knowledge skills, and experience to work out how the strategy could be implemented and enhanced. They know what skills and knowledge might be missing and can start anticipating. You treat people with dignity and respect and instead of seeing them as the unwilling who needs to be pushed, you see them as the solution to the problems.