The 7 Step Guide to Workplace Behavior that improves bottom line

Improving your organization’s core values can be easy if you know how to improve each aspect of the employee behavior displayed at your workplace – e.g. do you have a healthy meeting and workplace culture? Do you know how to make a workplace environment that is attractive for the different generations represented in your workforce? Or how to engage your employees in general?

Creating a positive atmosphere in your organization

Creating a positive workplace culture will only happen if you ensure open communication and cooperation among employees, provides healthy work/life balance, and meet your workers’ needs, while supporting equality, integrity, and transparency. Looking inward and deciding what sort of environment you want to create for the present and future of your company is key for developing a better workplace experience. This also includes recognizing the potential pitfalls, like bad meeting culture, the negative effect of office inefficiencies and distractions, lack of productivity, and how inadequate a centralized organizational model can be.

Workplace behavior encompasses all the important key points that can improve your business' success, employee productivity, and positive company culture. Firstly, the success of your business is highly dependent on its workforce, and providing a good work environment that promotes communication, collaboration, and employee development which would not only benefit your company performance, but it will also increase employee satisfaction. Next, the productivity of your workforce depends on your ability to create an inclusive and positive work environment. Ensuring a positive work environment has a wide range of advantages, including increased efficiency and boosted morale among employees which can directly affect your company bottom line. Finally, your company culture, customer satisfaction rankings, and overall employee productivity, are all likely to rise if your workers regularly display a positive workplace behavior. 

Furthermore, you can study your employees' behavior and make a workplace that fits their needs. By collecting insights and data of the utilization of your meeting rooms and workstations, you can gather intel about how your workspace is being used. Thereby, you can make data driven decisions about how to optimize it to fit your employees needs and match their work habits. If your office fits your employees’ work habits, you will get an inspired and devoted team that will boost overall productivity and business profitability when they have the right space to work in. Your top priority when choosing new tools, technologies, and rules should therefore be based on your employees.

In this guide we will take a deep dive to portray the many levels of workplace behavior and how best to accommodate them. Here are seven steps to creating a better workplace behavior that will help improve your company bottom line.  We support these steps based on AskCody's own  data research, based upon +500,000 users. 

Step one: Improve your meeting culture

Meetings are an essential part of doing business. You get together to exchange ideas, move forward, work together, learn, get better, and develop. This explains why individuals attend numerous meetings each week in a work setting. Meetings are a necessary component of the business world. However, the amount of time spent on scheduling and rescheduling these encounters is unnecessary. If you pause for a moment and think about how much effort you invest in organizing a single meeting it will add up. Evaluate the complexity and each step of planning a meeting and consider whether you could improve efficiency and cut down on wasted time and resources. 

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Do meetings often start late? Do they run longer than necessary? Are meetings taking over your employees’ workday? To improve the meeting culture at your company, start by recognizing all the obstacles that might seem insignificant at first glance, but could potentially add up and decrease your company productivity levels. Make sure to not tolerate tardiness, and to end all meetings at the arranged time. Make sure every meeting has a purpose, this improves communication and streamline thought. Having too many meetings can  undermine both employee productivity and overall business goals. Meetings are an essential part of conducting business, therefore, making sure you and your workers are able to be efficient when organizing them will benefit your employee productivity.

Step two: Establish a virtual meeting etiquette

Many of the meetings held today are virtual meetings, and their amount has increased in this age of hybrid work. Based on our own AskCody data there is a significant rise in the use of video conference rooms compared to rooms without video hardware. In 2022 usage has doubled, compared to December last year.

First, however, meetings can only be fruitful and meaningful if everyone present has a collective idea of what a productive meeting is, and what good meeting behavior feels like. Having some virtual meeting etiquettes can help set the standard for what good workplace behavior actually is. If you have bad habits in your meeting culture, they might snowball into more bad habits, resulting in a very toxic meeting culture. You can avoid this by making sure to create a meeting agenda and prioritize following it throughout the meeting. It is also important for everyone in a virtual meeting to make everyone feel welcome in the meeting.

To prevent unproductiveness during your virtual meeting:

• Make sure the meeting starts on time, everyone follows the agenda, and no time is wasted on distractions
• Make sure everyone knows when their camera should be on or if it is allowed to be off
• Make sure to address booth people in the room and those joining virtually.
  
  

Factors like picking the right background and establishing guidelines to maintain company image and avoid unnecessary distractions, choosing the right dress code can also ease the uncertainty about joining virtual meetings. One of the major drawbacks of virtual meetings is that they provide attendees the chance to multitask rather than paying close attention to the speaker. To maintain proper virtual meeting etiquettes and boost productivity make sure that participants understand that multitasking is an unacceptable workplace behavior.

Step three: Avoid the unnecessary work distractions

Losing concentration throughout the workday can have a negative impact on productivity and your work environment. Workers lose productivity and efficiency in the workplace every day because of interruptions from coworkers or other distractions. Distractions at work, however insignificant they might seem now, could add up and end up hurting your workers daily productivity and concentration on tasks. The worst thing that can happen when you trying to stay productive,  focused, and maintain a good work flow, is to get sidetracked by anything that is not urgent. 

The measures you can take to fight distractions at your workplace are:

• Make sure people can easily see if you are free or busy
• Make sure notifications are turned off
• Use asynchronous communication tools

Step four: Boost employee productivity by using the right tools

Inefficiencies and manual tasks have an immediate negative effect on productivity, which is tightly linked to the essential aspect of your employees’ morale. Employee morale and productivity suffer when workplaces are inefficient, and workers believe they are unable to perform well due to circumstances beyond their control. If your office is suffering from outdated processes and tools that are hampering efficiency and effectiveness, that could be one of the causes of low employee morale and productivity. Meetings are a constant source of wasted resources and produce frustrated office workers. However, they are not the enemy of efficiency—it is poor management.

To improve employee productivity and take your company efficiency to the next level you can easily succeed in meeting management by adopting the right system for it. Investing in the right technology is necessary to provide your workers with the tools they need to complete their task – Microsoft Teams, Visitor Management Solutions, Meeting Management Solutions etc. These tools facilitate and empower employees to easily access information cutting away some of their manual work tasks but also help them do their jobs and serve customers, visitors or partners better and more efficient. Microsoft Teams is a key tool when it comes to the crucial role of optimizing communication both within and across departments, as well as externally. Increase the efficiency of planning and managing your meetings and visitor management with the AskCody platform and make the first step towards improving the workplace behavior of your company. 

Step five: Consider and acknowledge how your employees differ 

It is important to take into consideration the differences in the workplace behavior and work-style that is evident in the current generations you have at your office. Recognizing their different traits is a key step towards a more harmonious office environment. Furthermore, acknowledging and acting on the fact that each generation has their own productivity markers due to the different environment they have grown up in, will help you boost your employees’ positive workplace behavior. Employers who have barely been adjusting to the common needs of millennials in the modern workplace now face a new hurdle in the goals, needs, skills, and workplace behavior of the newest kids in town: Generation Z. The office habits of millennials and Gen Z are very different, yet they are also very similar. Considering the various work styles of the different generations in your company is a crucial first step to creating a more peaceful work environment.

By facilitating and accommodating the work styles of all generations at your workplace, you will be closer to achieving a desirable and diverse work environment. Productivity is different for everyone. According to Microsoft's report on remote work trends, people are now taking advantage of being able to work when it is most convenient for them thanks to remote work's more flexible workday. Additionally, our own AskCody data shows that 10% of meeting rooms in 2022 are used outside regular opening hours, supporting the fact that employees are not strictly sticking to their 9-5 schedules anymore.

Adding benefits like flexible work hours to your job posts will benefit your business as it will attract more young professionals. They are proficient with technology, early adopters of emerging trends, and familiar with the freedom and power that comes with constant connectivity. Hybrid working is on the rise and organizations are to adapt to the needs of the current workforce by allowing employees to work from anywhere when possible, and try to be more flexible with work hours. Make sure to keep your employees' demands in mind while you develop the optimal workplace space. Go for a more encouraging workplace where you can ensure that staff members collaborate and where you can provide mentorship possibilities. Making your company attractive to young professionals is an important step in ensuring profitable hires, long-term growth, and success. Top talent nowadays is not content with simply punching a timecard. They are searching for partnerships that are solid, flexible work environments, and for a meaningful job.

Step six: Avoid creating negative workplace behavior

Just as important as the productivity boosters and improvements of the office culture is, considering all the negative workplace behavior – recognizing it and knowing how to avoid it is equally important. Good meeting management and good workplace behavior go hand in hand. It is important to recognize the bad meeting habits that are significantly decreasing your employees’ productivity. Room sharking and ghost meetings, for example, might appear to be harmless, however, when accumulated daily it might severely hurt company efficiency.  Decades of poor meeting management have already given meetings a bad name. What do you think no-show meetings does for employee morale when the general consensus is that meetings have become so unimportant that people can not even bother to schedule them properly—or even show up for them?

Businesses spend a lot of money and time on workplace upgrades, but they sometimes have little knowledge of how their employees actually use the space. Always base improvements on reducing workplace friction for workers. By adopting a meeting management platform, you could easily resolve your bad workplace habits, and gather insightful data to analyze and optimize on. Based on our AskCody data we have noticed meeting rooms being empty during the majority of the working hours: in 2022 meeting rooms have only been booked 15% of the opening time. If you start optimizing that number you could potentially cut down on your lease and improve the bottom line.

Step seven: Aim for maintaining a modern workplace culture

Nowadays, every smart business looks to the future. Not simply for goal-setting, benchmarking, and revenue growth, but also for creating the kind of workplace culture that attracts top talent and fosters employee growth. When it comes to workspaces, flexibility is essential. This is demonstrated by the increase in alternative office layout options, such as phone booths and huddle rooms, in addition to conventional conference rooms and contemporary open office layouts. To empower employee involvement and collaboration your business should try to provide an  engaging and technology-driven environment.

The workplace of the future does not just provide the modern spaces for employees to do their job, but it provides the tools and technologies to help employees best take advantage of everything around them. While a more open office environment has many shown advantages, like better access to natural light, more productivity, and better emotional and physical health, employees still require access to a variety of space types for the different tasks they have to perform. Considering the employees needs first is key to providing the most suitable environment for them to flourish.

Improve workplace behavior with meeting management software

When it comes to workplace inefficiency and bad meeting culture, you should take a proactive approach and eliminate them before they destroy your business. You can start by investing in a meeting management platform. Using the AskCody meeting management platform, you can set the foundation for your company's increase in productivity and employee satisfaction. The secret to establishing and maintaining a truly modern office setting is a fully integrated meeting management solution. Give your staff the resources they require to be successful.