Spring marks a time for intensive home cleaning and improvement. With the changing of seasons growing closer with each day, it’s an opportune spruce up your work environment.

Even Your Work Environment Needs a Spring Cleaning

Before you get ready for some all-out spring cleaning, it’s important to remember that making improvements to your company’s work environment doesn’t necessarily mean breaking out the brooms and mops. Instead, this time of year should be used to seek out refreshing ways to shake-up employee satisfaction, shine your company culture, dust off the way you hire, and everything in between.

Are you ready to do a little cleaning? Here are seven ways to spruce up your work environment this spring:

1. Show your flare for health and wellness. Unhealthy lifestyles are the primary factor to the six leading causes of death in the United States — heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory diseases, accidents, and diabetes. If your company isn’t putting an emphasis on wellness in the workplace, the time is now. While you may already be providing your employees with health insurance, there are many other ways you can boost your interest in employee health.

Consider creating a voluntary employee wellness program. This program is generally directed by a committee of employees and is dedicated to improving general health and well-being. Your wellness program can act as a driving force for changing a variety of healthy aspects both inside and outside the workplace. From offering your employees free or discounted gym memberships, creating a healthy eating policy for meetings and conferences, to providing health-risk assessment in the office.

2. Hire through employee referral. When it comes to your hiring process, you’re likely to hire a candidate who provides a reference from within the company. Employee referrals can prove extremely valuable for your organization. Why not consider hiring all employees based on this same method?

Building your company’s employee referral program will allow you to innovate your hiring process in a variety of ways. Using your employee network, you’ll be able to cut down on the time and costs involved in sourcing and screening candidates, while also gaining access to individuals who actually match desired qualifications. The employees who lead you to a good hire are able to receive a monetary reward for their referral — boosting employee satisfaction. What’s not to love?

3. Focus on growth. The work environment isn’t just a place to make an income — it’s the perfect environment for learning and growing. Seek out new ways to provide your employees with an atmosphere focused on improvement in terms of their skills and experiences. Provide training, personal and professional goal setting opportunities, benchmarks, and celebrate and reward accomplishments. Without a strong focus on employee-based growth opportunities, your staff is likely to lose motivation.

4. The setup. It’s surprising what spicing up your office setup can do for your work environment. Conduct an employee survey to gain feedback on both the small and large improvements you could make to the workplace. Some of the smaller things to consider could be raising the temperature a few degrees and reorganizing the layout of office spaces and cubicles. While the bigger setup changes could include new chairs and recreating your desk setups to introduce an open-plan bullpen setting for your employees.

5. Utilize social enterprise software. Does your company have its own internal social network? If not, it might be time to consider the benefits of utilizing social enterprise software. These unique platforms allow a secure way for companies and their employees to interact internally through sharing information and collaboration — from staying in touch with other employees to managing projects. If you’re looking to innovate and connect your company on an internal basis, it’s time to tap into this software.

6. Rethink communication. How does your company communicate its wins and losses? If you’re lacking a specific process, this is your chance to solidify something beneficial to your entire company. Improve the way you handle employer-to-employee communication by increasing feedback, and looking for innovative programs and platforms to open and maintain strong two-way channels of communication.

7. Cutback on time-wasting activities. Look to creating a more efficient work environment and minimize the stress of your employees by improving daily activities. It’s a common conundrum for meetings to run longer than expected due to straying from the agenda. Develop new approaches for hustling through mandatory, but often time-consuming, tasks to allow your employees to focus on meeting their deadlines

Let spring mark the time for improvement in your work environment. Begin reaching out to your staff to gain the necessary insight needed to make beneficial improvements for everyone.

How do you plan to spruce up your work environment for spring?