As it’s February, our commitment for this month is to help you bring L.O.V.E to your workplace.

And no, we are not suggesting you bite the bullet and go and ask Jen the IT Manager out for dinner. Our message of L.O.V.E goes a little something like this…

L is for Learning.

Learning is a fundamental part of working life and is a huge opportunity for us as business owners to really engage our people.

The majority of work these days is knowledge based. That means learning is needed to keep on top of skills and qualifications required to “do the job” – but it goes so much further than that.

Sharing knowledge internally can create stronger, more trusted bonds within teams, it allows you to start looking at succession planning a bit more seriously, it enables your teams to do more, develop themselves and improve their own skills which means they are likely to be engaged and will want to stay with you, and it can boost performance, productivity and happiness.

The question isn’t the old adage of “what if I train my employees and they leave?”.

It’s simply why wouldn’t you?

O is for being Open-minded.

Being open-minded is one of those things that we all nod along to and say “yes, I’m definitely that…” when in reality we may not be as much as we think we are.

We can be little devils when it comes to making assumptions about other people, treating opinions as facts and generally being a bit, well, judgy.

All of these things wrapped up into the way we communicate means that those trickier conversations may not go all that well and can leave us feeling unheard, frustrated and angry.

Being open-minded in any place, not just the workplace, means this.

1. Observe without judgment

2. Take responsibility for your feelings

3. Understand your needs

4. Make specific, doable requests

It’s called “compassionate communication” which sounds a bit, well, hippy… we know…stay with us. It provides you an amazing set of tools that can help us deal with stressful and challenging conversations.

V is for Values

Workplace values are your golden thread that everything in your business hangs off.

From your brand image, attracting and recruiting great people, encouraging the behaviours that you want in order to drive the culture you are nurturing, making business decisions – it’s all driven by values.

Values are not a marketing tool and they don’t just sit on your website or hang on posters on your walls.

They define the character of your culture by tapping into our social brains to create interactions that work.

If you want your people to fall in love with your workplace, you need to nail your values, understand them, recognise what they mean, and live and breathe them.

E is for Engagement (no diamond rings required).

Engagement from your people is the end result of your efforts in creating an amazing workplace. It’s essentially a measure of how strong the relationship – mental and emotional – is between your workplace and your people.

It’s a bit of a blanket term to be honest because what it covers is extremely broad. SO broad in fact, that there is little agreement in fancy research circles as to what a definition of “employee engagement” should be.

But that’s not the point though. You can make your own definition and create your own yard stick to find out how “engaged” your people are in ways that are meaningful to you and your business.

The point is and what the research does agree on, is that there seems to be a positive correlation between high levels of engagement and those nice business metrics such as customer satisfaction, staff retention and health and safety performance.

Our takeaway is this: build a great workplace, your people will be happy and motivated to do a good job. Seems pretty obvious to us…

Over the next 4 weeks we challenge you to bring all of these elements together into a beautiful crescendo in order to really drive forward those positive relationships with work.

Follow us on our social channels for hints and tips on how to wrap your arms around these four areas, give them a great big cuddle and start bringing more LOVE into your workplace.