Work is not necessarily meant to be a loud of laughs. It does not wait for you to decide to grace it with your presence; it has to get done with or without you regardless of how pleasant or unpleasant the work environment is. That being said, the better your work environment is the more likely your people will want to come to work.
They more they come to work, the better they will likely work pulling in more customers and making you, the owner, more money. Can’t complain about that, right? The trick can be in doing everything within reason to set your people up with the best work environment possible.
One thing every manager/ owner should do is make sure the company has a clear mission statement. It may seem self-explanatory for a self storage company, but some folks may have different ideas on what should be focused on.
Some may want to focus more on attracting new customers, other might be more concerned about making sure the current ones are happy, and others may want to put their energy into upkeep. Make the mission statement clear and your employees will know how they need to conduct business.
With that point clear you need to make sure that your employees are properly trained to conduct business in the way your mission statement dictates. There will be nothing that frustrates a workplace more than being confused about how jobs are supposed to get done.
A lot of employees like to also feel that what they do matters. For something like renting self storage units that may seem difficult to do. That is where the manager/ owner needs to make sure that people are coming to you (the self storage company) because they are in need of your service.
They are likely downsizing due to hard economic times and do not want to get rid of their stuff, in transition from one job location to another, or maybe they are combining households and have things they don’t want to get rid of.
Whatever the reason, people come to self storage companies looking to protect things, often sentimental items. Make sure your people understand that they are not just renting units, but they are helping people hold on to what matters most.
Another way of creating a good work environment is to make sure that the rules and expectations are simple, easy to understand, and uniformly enforced. There is nothing that can tear a workplace up faster than someone feeling like another person was allowed to skirt the rules.
Probably the most important part of creating and maintain a positive work environment is ensuring that the lines of communication are open between everyone. The only way that issues and problems can be taken care of before they create issues in the workplace is if people feel like they are able to bring it up and discuss so that it can be resolved.
Sources Used:
“Seven Hallmarks of a Great Self Storage Workplace: Keeping Within the Business Mission.” Inside Self Storage; 22 February 2011.
“Healing the Workplace: Powerful Prescriptions to Improve Employee Attitudes.” Inside Self Storage; 30 January 2011.