![Employee Morale: How to Boost Morale at Work [Checklist]](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5b34885067f597c481210ef0/61b71c1449924636adf9381f_0_BEf6dph211edKTW6.jpeg)
Being a leader of a team, you can often face not only business-related challenges but also such psychological difficulties as maintaining your employees’ morale. It becomes even more crucial these days when most teams are at least partly remote due to the pandemic.
These changes in the workflow cause difficulties for both team leads and team members when it comes to morale.
In this article, we will talk about what employee morale is, why a company needs a high level of morale, and how you can boost it. Keep reading to learn more about practices and tips to boost your team morale.
In a few words, employee morale is the determining factor of your team’s engagement and productivity level. Morale is the combination of the sense of satisfaction and the employee’s attitude towards the company and their job. It also highly depends on the sense of value for the company and relationships within the team. Team morale is vital for a business.
High morale can positively affect the productivity and creativity of each team member.
Firstly, the overall quality of work will be much higher when employees are engaged and motivated at work. Second, maintaining a high level of employee morale will help to reduce mistakes, accidents and fallouts. As a result, you’ll see more productivity and less absenteeism, which will significantly impact the budget.
The practices listed below are suitable for both boosting morale and maintaining it. Even if you think there is no need to boost your team’s morale right now, implementing these morale boosters in your workflow can help you avoid some difficulties connected with remote work.
One of the most relevant problems about remote work is the feeling of social isolation. The lack of communication makes many people feel lonely and abandoned.
Interactions between colleagues are vital.
It can be a good idea to schedule weekly team or departmental meetings so that you can discuss news or daily tasks with your employees. In addition, you can use conferencing tools such as Skype for Business or Zoom to communicate via video calls that may help your employees feel more connected with their co-workers and managers.
Another essential point is NOT to set too many meetings. If an employee has a team meeting on a Monday, a department meeting on a Tuesday, a company meeting on a Wednesday, and so on, it will just become tiresome and distracting. This is counterproductive! Two or three meetings a week is plenty, and for daily communications you can use chat tools such as Slack or WhatsApp.
Did you know that Hi5 integrates with Slack and WhatsApp? This means you can give Hi5’s from within the communication tools you already use!
The team needs to see the results of their work; each success and failure is another opportunity to help people stay connected and feel that they are an essential part of the company.
It’s a good idea to make short presentations for each weekly meeting that visualise the results of each project. PowerPoint can work well, or you can make engaging video presentations. For example, such presentation tools as Fastreel Video Editor and Lumen5 allow creating videos in several minutes using handy templates.
Team meetings should not stop at simply watching a presentation video together — everyone needs to analyse and discuss the results, find the reasons for failures, and highlight successes.
This practice can bring the team together and let employees know that they can discuss all the details of their projects with their co-workers.
Though you need to pay attention to both the positive and negative results at various points in your employees’ workflows, it’s absolutely necessary to highlight good moments.
Even if your team’s weekly performance doesn’t look great, mention the small successes of each team member and show employees that you value their efforts.
At the same time, you should be objective and transparent: recognise team achievements and behaviours that really help the company grow.
Recognition of achievements is one of the critical points that can increase morale and strengthen the engagement of your employees. A remote job can be a real challenge for many people, so they need to see that you value their effort. In addition, recognition and rewards can encourage employees as they realise that their work is significant (and appreciated) at the company.
Monthly, quarterly and annual rewards can be perfect for recognition bonuses. However, it is necessary to nurture daily effort in your team. For this, you can set some instant rewards, for example, for specific goals that are challenging to achieve or that are vital for the company.
Also, don’t forget about such simple words as “thank you” and “good job”, as these show your employees that you value them as people.
Besides weekly meetings on business questions, you should try to run some team building games for your employees. Team building games can be related to work, or just be super random and silly fun.
When team building games relate to work, they can help employees develop hard and soft skills needed for the improvement of their performance. They can also help your team relate to the company culture and values better, which will give the team morale another boost.
As the main aim of such team building activities is to bring people together, you can simply choose a game everyone likes and spend some time playing it and having fun. It can also be a good idea to watch a movie and then discuss it together.
For most people, the day-to-day routine can become oppressive as it can quickly turn into career stagnation. That’s why it’s really important to stimulate your employees to grow as specialists.
It can be a good idea to collaborate with some learning portals and provide a corporate discount for various courses for your team so that they could improve their professional skills.
Another excellent morale booster is the opportunity to step up their careers. Let your employees know what opportunities for growth there are for them at your company.
Remember that the company can also benefit from growing new leaders as they’ll have the platform to share creative, fresh ideas for business development.
As you can see, most of the morale boosters are about communication and paying attention to people. It shouldn’t be surprising, since the company is really only a sum of its parts: the employees. To keep your business growing and developing, you should always take care of the people who work for you.
The efficiency of work always depends on how comfortable and safe employees feel working at your company. It’s hard to focus on business processes if an employee feels lonely or underestimated; that’s why it would be best for every team leader to implement morale-boosting practices in the daily workflow.
Victoria is a content manager at Movavi. She specialises in writing user-friendly content and researching complex topics related to marketing, social media, and blogging to make them easy to understand for other people.
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