Are you struggling to find ways to boost staff morale?
Fear not, we’ve compiled the complete guide to understanding your staff and their needs, and how you can ensure your culture and morale stay on top of the pack!
We’ve all heard the saying, a company’s staff is its best asset. While you may agree or disagree, history has proven that this is a fact! Organisations that treat their employees as assets and recognise their talents have reaped the benefits.
By creating a strategy to boost staff morale, you will ensure a changing culture within your company, for the better.
What Is Staff Morale?
Staff Morale refers to your team members’ satisfaction, outlook, and attitude at work. It reflects the overall culture of an organisation and how well staff members are treated.
Many companies fail to recognise the importance of improving staff morale and the positive and negative impacts that staff morale has on a business.
By failing to recognise, you will fail to notice a decline in morale, thus creating a toxic working culture. By the time you identify a toxic culture, it may be too late to change it.
Why Is Boosting Staff Morale So Important?
Improving staff morale in any company is extremely important for a number of reasons!
The overall benefit of a great employee morale strategy is the long-term success of your company. Before you get to that level, you will see many smaller benefits that will end up creating this success.
Happy employees engage more, communicate more, work harder, work faster, and stay loyal. There is no quick fix to boosting staff morale, however, small, consistent changes will set you up for huge success!
The Benefits Of Improving Staff Morale
1. Staff Retention
By implementing a staff morale strategy, you will see a decrease in staff turnover. Recruiting puts a huge dent in the time and finances of any company. By helping your staff to feel motivated, you will notice staff staying longer in their roles and increasing their loyalty to your business.
2. Boosts Productivity
Happy staff work harder! By boosting your staff morale, you will see your employees inspired and performing to the best of their abilities! Your staff will recognise the importance of their role in your organisation in their own career and will work harder at a faster rate.
3. Shared Knowledge
Staff who work well together will notice the importance of their team members. This will lead to collaboration on more projects, where each team member gains more knowledge in other areas.
4. Gain A Competitive Upper Hand
Nobody knows what’s happening within any organisation. If you are struggling with certain things, you can rest assured your competitors have either encountered or will encounter the same thing in the future. By identifying the importance of staff morale, you will gain an upper hand on your competition. While they figure out how to navigate this issue, you can jump ahead and leave them trailing behind.
How Do You Boost Staff Morale?
With all this in mind, here are 6 Simple Steps to help you Boost Your Staffs’ Morale!
1. Measure And Monitor Morale Regularly
You first need to identify the overall morale within your company. You can do this yourself by checking the overall history of all staff members as a unit.
Has there been an increase in absenteeism? Has there been a decrease in productivity? Are there any other indications that something may be wrong? Some things you may notice are a decrease in product quality or an increase in grievances from customers, depending on the industry your company operates in.
If you can identify any fluctuations, you will be able to then delve deeper and identify any issues. If you notice a consistent trend of any of these issues, then this may tell you that staff morale is on a downward turn for some time and needs to be addressed.
2. Build And Maintain Trust
Like any relationship, trust plays a huge part. By creating a culture where upper management show trust in their employees, staff morale will see an uptick. This also works both ways, with staff members putting more trust in upper management and buying into the decisions made.
Trust has been brought into the spotlight recently, with the move to remote working during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Many companies were put in a position they hadn’t encountered before, with all of their staff having to work remotely. This forced management to trust their staff more.
Post-Lockdown, research has shown that productivity saw an uptick. Staff members didn’t have to commute, which made their work day seem shorter, leading to more productivity.
Some negative effects of the lockdown may have arisen from a lack of trust, where companies severely monitored their staff. This will have led to a decrease in morale, as it was a clear indication that management didn’t trust their staff members to do their work without being micromanaged.
3. Better Work-Life Balance
An add-on effect of remote working has seen better work-life balance for employees. By working remotely, there was no commute, allowing staff to have more time to themselves. This was particularly important for staff with families, especially young kids.
By actively promoting a better work-life balance, staff members will appreciate that you have their best interests at heart and actually care about their happiness and well-being. This has proven to have a huge boost on staff morale.
Some simple steps to promote this may be to have a rule stating there should be no work emails sent between certain hours. This also means that management shouldn’t send emails outside of working hours.
It may be as simple as letting employees leave 30 minutes early on a Friday. Only you know your business and what works best, but ensuring a better work-life balance has proven to help companies save costs of high turnover as opposed to making minuscule changes that have little to no impact on finances.
4. Mentoring
If you are reading this, you are probably in a role where you have had a lot of work experience. This may not be the case for your staff.
Many of your staff may be new to their role or inexperienced. This can be very daunting if there is no help or support for them. Think about your work experience. Have you had mentors that have helped you get to the position you’re in today?
Many people fail to recognise that they have had mentors in many roles they have been in. One could argue that nobody has ever succeeded in any career without getting some form of help.
Identify staff members that could grow with a mentor to help them. This doesn’t have to be something you have to even highlight. You could identify a staff member that you feel needs some mentorship and pair them with their mentor on an upcoming project. Have a word with the mentor and just tell them to help them and support them.
The results could be very surprising, where a staff member feels supported and can bounce ideas that would have otherwise been lost.
5. Ensure Your Staff Has The Correct Tools & Equipment
You wouldn’t hand a builder a hammer and tell him to build a house, would you?
Your staff could be the best and most knowledgeable staff in the World, but if they don’t have the tools to do their job, they will be wasted. This will lead to frustration and could lead to them leaving for some of your competitors. A high price to pay.
Ensure that you know and are informed of what tools your staff needs to do their jobs. By removing these barriers, you will remove any frustration and allow your employees to work effectively, boosting productivity and morale.
This is also true for employee equipment. A huge part of low productivity and high absenteeism is employees who are working with the wrong work setup.
Many companies fail to identify their legal obligations to ensure their staff is working in safe working conditions. This means that any staff working for more than 1 hour at their computer needs to have the correct setup that is safe and ergonomically friendly.
VDU/DSE Assessments should be conducted on all employees. From there, you can identify high-risk employees and provide them with the correct solutions to allow them to do their job. Some solutions can be as simple as providing them with an ergonomic chair or ergonomic mouse, while other solutions can be more complicated.
KOS Ergonomics is Ireland’s leading Ergonomic Workplace Solutions Expert. Working with companies such as Google, Apple, Twitter, Virgin Media, etc. they have been helping employers to meet their legal obligations since 1991.
6. Create A Clear Growth Path
Your staff will all have different needs and plans for their career. By sitting down with each individual, you can create a clear path for your staff members to succeed.
When your employees can see a path in front of them to progress, they will know what they need to do to succeed. You will be putting the ball in their court. This will allow them to scale any and all barriers and you will see a good boost in staff morale and a better working culture.
However, you need to ensure that the goal at the end of the path is achievable and that you hold up your end of the deal. If your staff meets the requirements, they need to be rewarded.
Conclusion
By now, you should see the impact that staff morale has on a company as a whole. By identifying the importance of staff morale, you can then work on improving it, and by improving it, you will reap the rewards in the long run.
Ensure that you are consistent with everything you do. Trying to boost staff morale for a month or a few weeks won’t work. It needs to be a concerted effort by everyone, especially upper management.
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