With rising redundancies and greater job insecurity among employees it’s no wonder that morale is low among many team members as they fear for the future of their current job.
Have you taken the time recently to consider how high the morale of your employees is?
You as a business owner or manager need to know how your employees are feeling at work, emotionally and mentally. Not knowing how your employees feel can have dire consequences.
Research shows a simple business formula behind morale and productivity, that is: low morale leads to low productivity and high morale leads to high productivity.
The truth is that in employees in many small businesses are required to carry out a much wider range of tasks and carrying a much heavier workload than their corporate counterparts, due to the low ratio of staff in small business compared to larger firms. If they leave, the expense to business owners of re-hiring and re-training is a huge burden and contributes to a disproportionately large chunk in your balance sheet.
One of the keys strategies to recession-proof your business is to take leadership of your staff with vision and courage to get them excited about being at work.
7 Top Tips for Keeping Morale High:
- Lead with vision and share it with your employees
- Engage with your employees – seek their ideas
- Create an environment where creativity and imagination can flourish
- Encourage high performance with positive attitudes – optimism, confidence, happiness and hope
- Inspire staff – make your staff feel they have something to aim for
- Be employee-friendly – talk with and listen to your staff
- Win the hearts and minds of your employees – understand your staff
But you may ask: how do I keep morale high in an uncertain economic environment?
- Ask employees for their input before making decisions that impact their roles or work
- Respond to employee questions or requests promptly
- Employees need to feel that their ideas are listened to and acted upon to feel part of solving problems
- Create an open-door policy if none exists. Encourage employees to use it once established.
- Recognize and reward your star employees and those that go the extra mile
- If cost-cutting measures are necessary, try to do them all at once, rather than draggin git out bit by bit
- Create a culture where employees see that their team’s work is contributing to making others’ lives better, rather than just a product or service
- Reaffirm that the challenges are only temporary and create a plan/scenario for your employers where they can see a brighter future beyond cutbacks
When assessing the morale in your culture, try not to confuse morale with people being happy. According to the Harvard Business Review, the definition of good morale is that people’s emotions contribute to, rather than subtract from, the unit achieving its goals. Many of the best examples of high morale come from situations of great unhappiness and stress–such as heroic actions in war, etc.
So, use your current circumstance to rally the troops, build a sense of camaraderie, and strength your team’s focus and dedication. Good luck!