According to recent studies, office friendships increase employee engagement, satisfaction and productivity. LinkedIn found that 46 percent of professionals across industries believe having friends at work is important to their overall happiness. Similarly, a 2012 Gallup report revealed that 50 percent of employees with a best friend at work reported a strong connection to their company—compared to just 10 percent of employees without a best friend at the office.

How can companies encourage office friendships? One way is through team building—even if your employees don’t turn out to be BFFs, they’ll get to know each other better and engage in conversations that don’t revolve around the latest client project. I spoke with Ido Rabiner, CEO and co-founder of Strayboots, an organization that specializes in team building through scavenger hunts, about the importance of team building and personal relationships in the workplace.

Knowing your teammates better, even just one small new detail, can improve your connection at work and create a healthier office environment. If people are more sensitive and responsive to each other, they’ll be better working together. I’m not talking about invading their privacy, but about getting to know your teammates as people first.

Your “human resource” is the most precious part of your organization. Research shows that companies with a 5 percent increase in employee engagement report 3 percent higher revenues the following year. In other words, team building exercises can have a direct impact on the quality of the work itself, in addition to improving employee engagement and loyalty.

We deal with this every day because teams, by definition, are diverse and we want to make sure everyone on the team feels included. We work with our clients to incorporate different types of challenges and layers into the scavenger hunt that align with different themes or objectives. All of our scavenger hunts can be fully customized to address a specific need, whether it’s taking the teams through specific areas to get to know their new office location, or adding company-focused questions and branding to improve their knowledge of the business.

Every team has its own agenda and company culture, so it varies from group to group. We’ve seen that most teams prefer doing their hunts in the early afternoon on weekdays, when people are still fresh and can make the most of their adventure. After all, it’s a fun activity and companies want full participation, so weekends and nights won’t work for everyone.

Employees need to feel that their company cares about investing in helping them become better teammates. Setting aside a special time and place for team building exercises communicates the message that it’s a mutual commitment.

Students may wonder why ENGL 101 is required at Bryant & Stratton College. Why is writing research papers relevant for our students? The two biggest reasons are success in other courses, and to master writing and research skills that will be used in any field.

Success at Bryant & Stratton ENGL 101 is focused on learning how to incorporate research into a paper. This skill will be used in other courses to demonstrate learning in your field. Particularly for the portfolio projects in your field, it is essential to be able to have a basic grasp of in-text citation and the reference page.  Instructors and peers should be able to easily distinguish between outside sources and the writer’s own ideas. Also, being able to discuss ideas from sources demonstrates to instructors a level of understanding of course concepts and is a valuable part of the learning process. Students learn more by incorporating reading material into a research paper than by simply reading it.

One of the institutional outcomes at Bryant &Stratton is information literacy. An institutional outcome is a skill not directly related to a specific program, but essential for the knowledge needed to be a college graduate. Information Literacy means being able to locate information and integrate it into a document. While this may not seem like a skill used in certain fields, it represents essential critical thinking abilities. It is information literacy that teaches us how to look up information, and how to evaluate information for credibility. Information literacy guides us on everything from researching issues related to voting, to discerning which websites to believe on expected salaries.

While students may not actually write papers after graduating, the skills learned in the process of writing papers are essential for other kinds of documents as well as critical thinking in evaluating information. The skills used in writing research papers include outlining, creating a main point, supporting with research, and revision. These skills would be used for detailed emails to employers or colleagues, or a presentation. 

Even if APA formatting is not used, it is still important to have an understanding of how to integrate outside sources to support your own ideas. Strong writing skills are also part of the soft skills employers seek. The article “The Importance of Good Writing Skills in the Workplace” on the Small Business Chronicle website explains that writing skills are part of a how an employee comes across: “People with good writing skills are generally seen as more credible” (O’Farrell 2016, para. 4).  Even work emails are an opportunity to show professionalism. By practicing the skills of writing and research, our students will be prepared to excel in the courses related to their field, as well as possess the writing and research skills needed to be confident in the workplace writing they will need to do, beginning with the perfect resume!

Companies, and even governments, often try to hold down wages in an effort to reduce their labor costs. Following 9/11, when the airline industry experienced mass cancellations, almost all airlines—except for Southwest—not only had layoffs, but obtained large wage concessions from their workers. When U.S.-based automakers struggled to turn a profit, they negotiated two-tier wage structures where new employees would make less money. The recession of 2008 accelerated this trend: “Pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression,” wrote the New York Times in 2009. Pay for the average worker remains constrained today, possibly one explanation for ongoing financial stress and political turbulence.

But contrary to what many company leaders, Wall Street workers and HR professionals seem to believe, employees’ rate of pay is not synonymous with labor costs (which reflect not just the rate of pay but also productivity). Moreover, labor costs have little bearing on competitiveness or profitability. Many companies in Silicon Valley pay very well, but, because of their business models, are extremely profitable. But lower wages do lead to ill health and financial stress, indicators of diminished well-being.

Evidence suggests that if companies paid more, not only would they help their employees, they would actually help themselves. Here’s the logic.

In 1914, Henry Ford introduced a $5 per day wage at the Ford Motor Company, more than doubling the prior rate of pay. According to Robert Lacey’s book, Ford: The Men and the Machine, the move aroused the ire of The Wall Street Journal, which accused Ford of “economic blunders if not crimes.” The result: diminished turnover, higher quality workers and higher productivity and profits.

About 100 years later, Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, generated mammoth publicity—and skepticism from Fox Business—when he announced a $70,000 annual minimum wage for Gravity’s employees. The much-talked-about move drove customer leads through the roof, and Gravity, a relatively small company of about 200 employees, received thousands of employment inquiries. Profits have never been higher.

These are not just interesting examples. They’re consistent with fundamental ideas in economics. The principle of efficiency wages refers to paying above market to improve workers’ productivity levels. As economist Lawrence Katz explained, “High wages can help reduce turnover, elicit worker effort, prevent worker collective action [unionization], and attract higher quality employees.” Evidence suggests that with more motivated and higher quality workers, less supervision is required because the employees are less likely to shirk responsibilities and are more qualified, thereby saving on supervisory costs.

Because of the profit-enhancing, cost-reducing effects of higher wages, in the end, paying more might actually reduce labor costs. Higher wages can, therefore, actually pay for themselves.  

A contemporary illustration of this phenomenon can be seen in University of Colorado professor Wayne Cascio’s detailed comparison of Costco with Walmart’s Sam’s Club. As Cascio documented, Costco pays higher wages and offers more generous benefits than Sam’s Club, making its labor costs higher. But turnover at Sam’s Club was 44 percent, while it was only 17 percent at Costco, saving literally hundreds of millions of dollars on replacing employees. He went on to explain that, “Costco generated $21,805 in U.S. operating profit per employee, compared to $11,615 at Sam’s Club,” meaning that Costco’s more experienced, more productive workforce more than offset its higher cost.

In labor markets, as in many other markets, you get what you pay for.

Minimizing labor costs should not be a company’s primary objective. In many instances, even in contract manufacturing, labor costs are a relatively small proportion of total costs. As a senior executive at Levi’s, the clothing company, told me years ago, spending a lot of time trying to reduce costs of something that accounts for a small proportion of total costs—and in apparel manufacturing, labor costs are truly minuscule—is misplaced emphasis.

Companies are much more interested in maximizing their profits, the difference between revenue minus expenses. Profits come from product and service innovation, productivity and outstanding levels of customer service that generate customer loyalty—all things produced by a workforce that is engaged and cares.

So what happens when those factors are missing? The airline industry, with its almost omnipresent wage reductions and conflict with employees, serves as a cautionary example. Joe Sharkey, the former New York Times travel columnist reported that a survey by the Travel Industry Association “found that the consensus among travelers was that air travel was bad and getting worse.” As a result, fed-up fliers deferred 12 million business trips and 29 million leisure trips, costing the airlines the revenue from these 41 million foregone journeys.

HR executives should take the lead in bringing these higher wage arguments and the associated evidence to senior management so that companies can make more sensible decisions concerning pay levels.

It’s also worth noting that the arguments about holding down wages somehow never apply to the C-suite, where the ratio of CEO to average employee pay has soared over the past few decades. However, the importance of recruiting and retaining talent extends beyond executives to the entire workforce (a notion that HR teams should be championing), which is why paying more can pay off.

To be fair, high pay is only relative (compared to what competitors are offering), which is why if every company tried to put this advice into practice, it wouldn’t work. But given the overwhelming tendency to think that simply reducing labor costs will increase profits, this is not a concern I would worry about. After all, few auto companies followed Ford’s lead, and I don’t see lots of payment processing companies emulating Gravity Payments. 

As economic research has reported for decades, paying people more is not just good for those individuals, it means better business. That’s why some of the companies that pay—and treat—their employees well have the best financial results.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was to focus on moving the needle, rather than achieving perfection. “Get 80 percent of the way there,” said one of our senior leaders, “And fix what was missed later.” It\’s a nugget of wisdom I wish I had learned earlier in my career—and, as such, I\’ve gotten in the habit of sharing it with every new employee on my team.

What\’s wrong with perfection? All too often, we place pressure on others and ourselves to create the perfect report or complete a perfect project. But instead of driving innovation and improving performance (as one would assume), this pursuit of perfection actually stunts creativity and limits achievement.

Think about it: If your goal is to deliver flawless work, you\’re likely going to stick within the boundaries of what you know, whether that\’s your own work or what you\’ve seen others do before you. And while there\’s something to be said for understanding \”what works,\” there\’s more to be said for figuring out what works even better.

Today\’s work landscape values innovation over tradition—coloring outside of the lines over checking boxes. The people (and, subsequently, organizations) that succeed today are the ones willing to try something new. In order to foster a culture of pushing the envelope, you can\’t strive for perfection—instead, you need to make peace with failure.

Of course, opening ourselves up to the idea of failure isn\’t easy. Our instinct as managers is to guide people towards success, to police growth and ensure that everyone is capable of fulfilling their responsibilities.

Employees don\’t tend towards failure either, because the typical organization doesn\’t reward failure; it rewards a crossed-off to-do list and achieved goals.But it\’s time for a shift in perspective. This doesn\’t mean creating a culture of failure, but creating a culture where the chance of failure is okay. If you want your employees to swing for the fences, you need to ensure that they\’re comfortable striking out once in a while.

Encouraging failure is not only antithetical to the traditional way of managing, it\’s also risky. As a manager, how do you allow employees to fail without discouraging them or jeopardizing your work?

The key is to think about failure strategically. Yes, allowing someone to miss the mark on any initiative is inherently messy and unpredictable, but if you approach the possibility of failure with a purpose, you will ultimately achieve more in the end.

First, be deliberate about providing opportunities where failure is an option. A culture of innovation isn\’t simply created by telling employees to take risks and think big—you need to create actual opportunities for them to do so. In addition to providing your team with projects and responsibilities where they can excel, provide them with \”stretch assignments\” that exist just beyond their comfort zone.

Second, step outside of the comfort zone with them — if you\’re going to put people in a situation where failure is either imminent or highly probable, be ready to coach them back out of it. The last thing you want to do as a manager is put someone in a position where they might fail, and not provide them with the resources (whether it\’s yourself, a fellow teammate or a mentor) to fix it.

The ultimate secret to fostering a positive view of failure is feedback. From the beginning to the end of a project, managers should create a culture of open communication with employees.

This starts by setting the right expectations: Don\’t give your employees a stretch assignment unknowingly—this will only confuse them, and likely stress them out. A stretch is achievable, but with a degree of risk. Tasks that are easy to complete will create a sense of boredom in employees. Let\’s say you\’re planning a training session for your department. You want Molly to lead the session; and while she\’s helped you put together slides and materials for past events, she\’s never presented one herself. Sit down with her and let her know you want her to take on the next session, but emphasize that you\’re intentionally putting her in an uncomfortable place—you don\’t expect her to know exactly what to do, and that\’s okay.

Next, ask about Molly\’s concerns, and define a way to assuage them during the process: What are your biggest hesitations? What will you do when you\’re lost? Where do you want my help? Then, provide guidance along the way, but make sure she\’s developing and practicing it on her own first. If you want Molly to grow, you should be there as a sounding board for the stretch project—not a collaborator.

Finally, after the presentation, ask for her feedback first: What went well? What went poorly? What would you do differently? Then, offer your own commentary — and make sure you deliver it in the best way. Molly might prefer feedback \”right between the eyes,\” whereas Mike prefers you couch criticism between praise.

Offering opportunities for your employees to take a risk will not only encourage them to proactively think outside the box, but also show them that failure is not the enemy. Complacency is the enemy—and in our dynamic, fast-paced world, it\’s the ones who dare greatly who ultimately succeed.