How to improve employee morale

Avoiding workplace burnout and increasing employee wellbeing are shaping up to be major focus areas for HR leaders. A critical component in achieving both of these goals is employee morale – a concept that’s proven to have a powerful impact on various aspects of the employee experience, including retention, engagement, and productivity.

Below is an overview to help you understand what employee morale is, who influences employee morale, and how to boost it at your organization.

What is employee morale?

Employee morale is a description of the satisfaction, outlook, and feelings of wellbeing an employee has at their jobs.

This is not to be confused with employee engagement, which goes hand-in-hand with employee morale but is not the same.

The easiest way to think about employee morale is as a component of employee engagement. For instance, consider all the factors that go into maintaining your physical health: you need to sleep well, eat healthily, and exercise consistently. You can’t achieve optimal physical health without having all these factors aligned. Similarly, there are many pieces you need to have in place to achieve high employee engagement – one of which is high levels of employee morale.

Who impacts employee morale?

It can be easy to assume that employee morale is solely an “HR problem.” While People teams influence how employees feel about their jobs, they’re not the only ones who have an effect. Below is a breakdown of other work groups to consider and their effect on employee morale.

• C-suite
  Even though most employees don’t interact with the C-suite regularly, they’re still heavily impacted by the decisions made by leadership. For instance, if your company is going through an acquisition, a communicative, empathetic, and supportive executive team will maintain – or even boost – employee morale during this transition. But a secretive C-suite suddenly announcing this decision without context will lead to suspicious and unhappy employees.
• Managers
  This one is no surprise. This relationship can be one of the most significant bonds in the workplace because a manager is the most familiar with an employee’s workload, strengths and weaknesses, and career goals. While we support the idea that people leave companies, not managers, it’s difficult to dispute that this group considerably impacts employee morale.
• Coworkers
  The individuals that employees interact with daily are likely to color how they view their jobs. When people work with colleagues they respect and can laugh with, they’re much more likely to enjoy their work. On the other hand, if employees have colleagues they clash with on a daily basis, going to the office will feel like a stressful endeavor.

How to improve employee morale

There are endless things you can do – regardless of whether you’re an executive, manager, or peer – to boost employee morale at your company. To make the recommendations easier to digest, we boiled everything down into three pillars and shared actionable tips that map to each one.

Communicate  

• Keep employees looped in. Keeping employees looped in on everything from team updates to product changes is important, even if it seems minor. People don’t like to be surprised by changes that everyone else already seems to be aware of, and it can cause feelings of isolation and negativity.
• Explain decisions. This one is especially relevant for managers and the C-suite. Don’t make decisions in silos, then expect everyone to be on board. Provide context, communicate early and often, and consider everyone’s responses.
• Ask for feedback. Communication is a two-way street. Allow employees to share feedback with you regularly – and act on it! Seeing this will make employees feel like valued members of the team.

Recognize

• Regularly provide positive feedback. Conversely, providing positive feedback is equally important to keeping employee morale high. Consistency is key – don’t let several months go by without sharing words of appreciation with your team.
• Reward good work. This goes a step beyond providing feedback. If your employee or team works extra hard on a project or produces exceptional results, reward the high-quality work with a lunch out or other small tokens of recognition.
• Create a culture of collaboration. Encourage everyone to be generous with praise and recognize each other’s good work. Feeling part of a team that’s collaborative and supportive of one another is much more conducive to high employee morale than in a cut-throat environment.

Empower

• Trust your employees. Employees want to feel like they’re adults who are trusted to get their work done. Constantly checking in on their progress or questioning their vacation days is a surefire way to cause resentment. Instead, if your responsible employee needs to take a day off, approve it without hesitation and know they’ll finish their project when they’re back.
• Be supportive of goals. Whether you’re a manager or a peer – make it clear that you’re there to support your employee’s goals. Whether by providing learning opportunities or serving as an advocate, feeling supported by the company is healthy for employee morale.
• Provide autonomy. If your employee consistently produces high-quality work, encourage them to take creative risks and spearhead challenging projects. This is a great way to empower them to really take ownership of their work.

While focusing on the big picture of employee engagement is tempting, don’t forget that employee morale is a piece of the puzzle. If you’re interested in learning how Culture Amp can help you track employee engagement at your company, request a personalized demo below. 

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