Do not overlook the critical importance of having high morale among your staff. People who are unhappy, for good reasons or not, do an overall worse job than those who are happy. Unhappy or dissatisfied employees will be unproductive and make mistakes - even willful mistakes. These people will be more likely to run off your customers and they will bad mouth you to the public. You will pay them hour by hour and day by day to do a poor job and hurt your business until the day that you finally decide to fire them. The worst thing about this is that if you would have done a better job of boosting productivity by boosting morale, you could have avoided all of the bad things that happened. So, the question is: "How do I boost morale in my organization?"
The first thing you must do is ask the staff what's wrong and what's right, what they like and what they dislike, how they feel about management, what they would change about the company, and certainly other questions that are relevant to your organization. You need to take these answers very seriously - especially the trends or the responses that come up over and over again. Let the staff know that you are taking their responses seriously and take appropriate actions on the things that you can change. Communicate the reasons you can't change other things so that the staff at least knows they were considered.
How can you get positive responses that are leading to high productivity and excellent results? Great question! Here are some things you can do and that you really should do right away.
1. Give consistent positive feedback to everyone and for everything that deserves it, even for the smallest things.
2. Sincerely tell people thank you for doing a good job - consistently and often.
3. Don't obsess over the negative and don't panic, especially publicly for the staff to see.
4. Reward success. Set up a reward system for reaching desired targets. These do not have to be in the form of huge bonuses. Small, public rewards and recognitions will go a long way.
5. Give awards such as employee of the month or top performer award.
6. Be super-nice to people. Let them know that you LIKE them and that you CARE about them.
7. Do the little things that cost little and mean a lot. This is different in every office. In my office, it would be something as simple as letting the staff choose different color uniforms when we purchase new uniforms anyway.
8. Train your management team to be supportive to staff and to be expert in their work areas. Expert and supportive managers create high morale among their direct reports.
9. Train employees so that they are expert at their jobs. Highly trained employees tend to have higher job satisfaction because they are equipped to do a good job.
10. Speak nicely of employees in front of their coworkers, their managers, their husbands or wives, and others. Public recognition and compliments make people feel good and want to do a good job. This is very powerful.
Do not under-estimate the power of high morale over your company's productivity. If you ignore it, do not be surprised when you miss the mark. To break records, do the right things to keep people happy and motivated.
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