Help Boost Staff Morale
The workplace environment and atmosphere projected and nurtured by your organisation can have a massive impact on the productivity and well-being of your employees.
Does your workforce buzz chirpily into the office in the morning? Or do they have to drag themselves in, taking more days off than you’d expect?
If the latter scenario sounds familiar, then staff morale could do with a boost.
Low morale means more than a sluggish atmosphere – it results in lowered productivity, greater turnover of staff and poor cooperation. Raising morale is a major priority of effective leaders.
The following tips may come in handy to help boost staff morale.
1. Ensure You Reward Creativity and Achievements
As a business leader planning for the next quarter, it’s natural to focus on the future, but remember to spare a thought for how much has already been achieved. Taking time out to reflect allows your employees themselves to realise how much they’ve achieved. You could ask each department or members of staff to submit a list of their greatest accomplishments and then compile and share them across the organisation.
2. Assist Your Employees in Pursuing Their Passions
This is epitomised by Google’s famous ’20 per cent time’, where employees are allowed to use up to 20 per cent of their paid time for personal projects. This has produced some incredible innovations for Google. Allowing your staff to follow their passions re-energises them, giving employees a short break before they return to their usual responsibilities with renewed energy.
3. Remind Staff of the Value of Your Organisation’s Mission
It’s easy for us to lose our sense of purpose when immersed in the daily grind, but the truth is that everyone wants their work to be worthwhile. How you re-centre your staff on to the core values of your company depends on the specifics of your business, but you could take time to discuss customer testimonials and reviews weekly to remind staff of the ways that they’re improving people’s lives.
4. Promote Positive Ways of Thinking
A simple way to boost morale is to promote positive attitudes. Taking just 10 minutes out of the day to show and discuss inspiring videos about overcoming a problem can help to inculcate a positive workplace culture where employees look on the bright side and view problems as obstacles to be overcome.
5. Mix Things Up Once in a While
Routines can be very efficient, but they need shaking up occasionally or staff end up mindlessly going through the motions. Common examples include ‘dress-down Fridays’, where employees can wear their own clothes, or taking a day off to hold a sports tournament between staff. Have fun with it – let your staff come up with suggestions.
6. Give Something Back to the Community
An excellent way to boost morale is to encourage employees to leave the office for a few (paid) hours a week to volunteer for a local charity of their choice. If practical, you can develop team-working skills at the same time by letting whole teams or departments volunteer for charitable projects as a group.
7. Have fun!
This is the most obvious but often overlooked strategy to boost morale. Make fun a recurring part of the working week.
Implementing these ideas will create a much happier and more effective staff team.
Allsquare are professional accountants in Edinburgh offering financial and business services to help small to medium companies with business growth strategies. For more information, call Allsquare today on 0131 343 1510.
