It is no secret that employees with good morale levels have a better perspective regarding their work. They feel more secure in their role, inspiring them to work hard and accomplish more as a team. They have a shared vision and know teamwork is the best way to ensure their company’s long-term success. After all, happy employees want your company to thrive.
Employee Morale
Employee morale is the attitude, satisfaction, and overall outlook of employees during their association with an organization or a business. If your organization has a poor culture then there will be adverse effects like low productivity, low employee satisfaction, etc. It can most certainly lead to greater employee attrition, just to begin with.
Tips For Your Workplace
1. Stay connected with your employees: Feedback is an effective mechanism to stay in touch with your employees. For example, deploy an employee engagement survey at timely intervals to get first-hand employee feedback about how engaged or motivated are your employees.
2. Your managers must be coaches: Over the last decade or so, the definition of a manager has slightly shifted from being a taskmaster to a coach. Your managers should be like coaches. They should be able to help employees learn and grow within the organization. A good manager or a supervisor will not only motivate an employee to perform better but also help them resolve problems and related issues.
3. A good workplace culture: Like you cannot simply induce employee engagement, you cannot expect that a negative work culture will help induce high morale. Good company culture will help employees settle in faster especially the new employees. New employees are most susceptible to workplace gossip. One negative word can make them doubt their decision to be in the organization thus affecting your employee Net Promoter Score.
Importance of Employee Morale
Employee morale is important because it’s linked directly to employee engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and overall productivity. With good employee morale, employees are more likely to be engaged, be more productive, and have a better quality of life. Low employee morale limits productivity and can affect your employee’s health and wellbeing.
5 Factors To Consider
Employee morale is a complex phenomenon and depends on various factors. Here is the different criterion that affects employee morale:
1. The organization’s employee morale:
While it may sound surprising, the organization itself is one of the biggest and most important factors that affect employee morale. An organization influences an employee’s attitude towards his/her work. The reputation of an organization can certainly build up for better or worse, their attitude towards it.
2. Type of work:
The nature of work an employee is performing at his/her workplace also is greatly responsible to determine the morale. It can make situations worse for an employee. Therefore, an unorganized organizational structure also affects employees, if the employee feels that he/she is just a cog machine in a factory line, instead of a real person, this too may adversely affect their morale.
3. Personal attributes:
Mental and physical health play an important role in determining employee morale. There are also other important factors that concern their progress and in turn their morale: age, education qualification, years of experience, occupational levels, reward perception, and similar factors.
4. Supervision and feedback:
The level of supervision received by an employee is a tremendous factor that affects morale. If the employees feel they have no direction or don’t understand the organizational goals and commitments, then it is the job of the superiors and the leadership in the organization to get them on the same page. But there should not be too much interference too if the employees are given the freedom to work their morale will be high.
5. Work-Life balance influences employee morale:
Most organizations fail to recognize the importance of a healthy work-life balance. It is important that the employees have some activities to relax while they are at work. It’s not just about the foosball culture or an inventory stuffed with food. Forbes magazine emphasizes the importance of maintaining a balanced lifestyle for employees to increase productivity and boost levels of employee satisfaction.
Learn more: 15 Employee Morale Survey Questions You Need to Ask
4 Simple Tips to Boost Employee Morale
Employee morale is determined by how employees view their work environment and their overall level of satisfaction in their workplace. Employee morale has a direct effect on employee retention. A disinterested or unhappy employee will not stay for long in an organization where he/she cannot rationalize their goals and progress with.
Here are the 4 simple ways of boosting employee morale in your workplace as mentioned by HR leaders across the globe:
1. Streamline work based on skills:
It is important for Human Resources to recruit and assign people based on their skill set. You cannot hire a lawyer and expect him/her to carry out tasks that you would expect an engineer to do. Allowing people to work based on their competency is a win-win situation for both employees and employers.
2. Train them well for professional development:
Most organizations fail to understand the importance of training their staff. Be it employee onboarding or any other formal training process, employees should be well-equipped to perform their tasks at work and achieve their goals. There should be a budget assigned at the start of the financial year that facilitates the training and development program.
This training will help employees sharpen their skills, which will not only employee benefit them but also the organization. A well-organized and self-sufficient workforce is every organization’s dream, so pay for these courses that ignite imagination and spark curiosity, build confidence and lead to a high morale workforce.
3. Recognize and reward employees to boost employee morale:
Employee recognition and reward keep your workforce motivated. When, as a leader, you create an environment where good work is appreciated, employees feel empowered and take a personal interest in the tasks they are assigned to them.
The purpose of employee recognition should be to reinforce what an organization wants an employee to do more. When an employee performs well make sure to applaud his/her hard work and achievements.
4. Be open to feedback:
Many organizations today, promote the open door policy, where an employee is free to express what they feel to their superiors or their reporting authority because they are open to continuous feedback.
LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Competency
Employees need to feel they can come to their managers. Therefore, this will create a healthy and reoccurring feedback loop that will improve your team. Instead, be receptive to feedback, transparency is the need of the hour for most organizations and so it should be.
Learn more about how getting ongoing feedback from your employees will lead to making a positive impact in your organization with QuestionPro Workforce.
