Vision Personal Training Founder and Managing Director, Andrew Simmons, offers insight into how investing in your employees’ happiness sets your business up for success

The word ‘happiness’ is more than just an inspirational term slapped across the kitchen noticeboard, and it’s not a destination at the end of a busy month. Happiness is a state of mind; 10 per cent what happens to us and 90 per cent how we react.

Making happiness the intrinsic rock of your company’s core values is the key to attracting and retaining the right people. Implementing changes in how you communicate and treat your people can make all the difference.

Positivity breeds positivity. Incorporating positive language into your company’s internal communication processes is a great way to spread happiness through your organisation.

Don’t be afraid to get personal. Sharing a meme or a joke that gives people a minute of respite to laugh between back to back briefs goes a long way.

Invest in your employees’ development. Employees want to know you’re invested in their career growth. Providing employees with an education allowance proves you’re invested in them for the long haul and incentivises them to participate in activities that will further their knowledge.

Celebrate wins. Once objectives have been hit, celebrate. People want to know their hard work is noticed and when they have a taste of it, it becomes an effective driver for continued wins.

Be consistent. Implementing all the above will make happiness spread like wildfire within your organisation – but only if you’re consistently applying the new way of communicating and consistently voicing your encouragement for career growth.

At Vision, our core values centre around the term happiness. We use “happiness” as an acronym for the way in which each of our team players conduct themselves. By committing to these values on a daily basis, happiness spreads throughout our entire organisation.

Health – Passionately pursuing a personal commitment to healthy eating and exercise.

Actions – Taking ownership, accountability and responsibility for our actions.

Professional – Maintaining professional relations with colleagues and clients.

Promise – Under promising and over delivering.

Inspect – Inspecting the systems and proposing all possible solutions if something is not working.

Never ending – Embracing and driving change through never ending personal growth and learning.

Exceptional – Delivering WOW through exceptional quality and consistency of service.

Spirit – Building family spirit amongst the team and the network as a whole.

Seek – Seeking to understand before we are understood.