Why a happy team means greater productivity and better care

When you are tired, on your third long weekend in a row, with half your team off sick with COVID and a myriad of tasks still to be done, focusing on improving the happiness and healthiness of your team might not appear to be the top priority. But happiness and healthiness should be at the top of your list if you want to make sure that the people your team support are getting the best care

Happiness, healthiness, and a good quality of life are things we all aspire to. The happier and healthier your workforce, the more productive they will be. Linking happiness, healthiness, and productivity might seem odd. Surely productivity is about doing more for less, and maximising every second that your workers are being paid to work? If four staff can run the shift rather than five, or if that support worker can do a 15-minute task in 14 minutes – is that improved productivity? Will those workers be happy and healthy? Will the people they support be happy and healthy?

The culture of your team impacts on happiness and healthiness. A team that cannot be honest with each other, distrusts each other, is made up of a number of cliques, or has some team members who are more plain-speaking than others, are some of the ways in which the culture of the team can have an impact. Enabling your team to understand its culture together and the influence each member of the team has on that culture is important. If team members feel they have to second guess what other members are thinking and can only tell each other what they think they want to hear, this will cause the whole team stress. This can manifest itself in a reluctance to make decisions without the whole team agreeing and a lack of challenge to anything people in the team have to say. A team where the integrity of the team is more important than good decision-making will always be a stressed team.