Only 36% of employees are engaged in their workplace, even though there’s a clear correlation between high morale and improved productivity. If employers want to improve ROI and their company culture as a whole, they need to start investing in wellness and employee morale. So how to boost employee morale?
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How to Quickly (and Easily) Boost Employee Morale
Positive employee morale can build resilient teams that don’t falter during difficult times.
Here’s how to foster a healthy work environment that concentrates on improving employee happiness.
1. Start Recognizing and Appreciating Your Employees
The next time your employee goes above and beyond, acknowledge their hard work and contributions to the company through words of encouragement, praise, or rewards. Giving out awards to employees results in higher morale and happiness and more loyalty to the company.
2. Provide Opportunities for Growth and Development
Offer training, professional development courses, and leadership programs to help employees learn new skills and advance their careers. If you build a career path for them, you’ll find they’re more motivated to perform daily tasks. Plus, they’re more likely to stay with your company after you learn to boost employee morale.
3. Foster a Positive and Supportive Work Environment.
Encourage a culture built on teamwork, open communication, and collaboration, not one based on rushing, backstabbing, or hurt feelings. You should do your best to reduce stress in your work environment. So consider adding an employee assistance program to your company.
4. Offer Flexible Work Arrangements
Despite what some employers want, remote work isn’t going anywhere. In fact, many workers prefer flexible schedules, telecommuting, and the ability to work from home. If you can offer some of these options to your employees, you’ll notice that many of them will start to thrive.
Flextime, also referred as flexible work arrangements, describes work environments and schedules that don’t have the typical restrictions of a standard employment. These agreements take into consideration each person’s unique demands and enable workers to better coordinate their work hours with their personal obligations.
Working from home, often known as home sourcing, is the most typical type of flexible work arrangements when people work full-time from their homes to boost employee morale. Job sharing, telecommuting, and a condensed workweek are more examples.
5. Promote a Healthy Work-Life Balance
Encourage your employees to take breaks, take time off when needed, and prioritize their well-being. Consider offering wellness programs or resources, such as gym memberships, healthy snack options, or stress management resources, to support your entire workplace.
6. Encourage Open Communication and Feedback
Encourage employees to share their ideas, concerns, and feedback with management and create an open-door policy for employees to voice their frustrations. To support this initiative, management has to take all employee feedback with grace and apply some of what’s said.
When it comes to promoting diversity and inclusiveness in the workplace, it is important to avoid playing favorites, to demonstrate basic decency, and to pay particular attention to the ways in which non-discriminatory practices and regulations might be embraced. When employees believe it is “safe” to speak their problems and ideas without fear of being victimized, they experience a greater sense of inclusion. Companies are given the ability to not only listen to. But also actively welcome, varied points of view when individuals are free to express themselves without fear of reprisal.
7. Train managers to Tackle Employee Morale
If managers aren’t the cause of low morale, then the responsibility to boost employee morale rests on their shoulders, regardless. All startups should commit to training managers in emotional intelligence, giving feedback and recognition, communication, and various leadership styles.
8. Provide Increible Employee Incentives
While it’s important to pay employees what they’re worth, offer competitive health benefits, and encourage genuine breaks, employers can set themselves apart by providing other incentives. For example, you could offer an in-office cooking class or bring in puppies for them to play with.
9. Promote Workplace Diversity and Inclusion to Boost Employee Morale
When you promote workplace diversity, your employees understand that thinking outside of the box is an asset to the company, not a detriment. Not only that, but Gen Z and Millenials want to work for employers who encourage creativity and input from all people and backgrounds.
The following are some examples of further inclusive methods that enhance diversity and inclusion in the workplace:
- Providing workers with the option to take time off work to celebrate religious holidays, even if such holidays are not officially recognized by the organization.
- Providing childcare services on-site.
Review the layout of your workplace to verify that it is an inclusive environment, including ensuring that there are toilets that are not based on gender. - Increasing the number of jobs that allow for a flexible schedule.
- Using a mobile workforce app that includes a translation option. So that each employee is able to communicate in the language that is most comfortable to them.
10. Let Go of Workplace Bullies or Abusers
Although most companies have an anti-bullying program, little is being done to actually stop the problem. However, workplace bullying affects our happiness, injures our health, and destroys productivity. If there’s a bully at your organization, let them go before they hurt more people.
In Conclusion: How to Boost Employee Morale
As soon as you realize your workplace is suffering from low morale, lack of teamwork, and a high turnover rate, you need to take a stand. Always remember that your employees are the lifeblood of your company, and you need to do well by them to improve your work culture.
David is a dynamic, analytical, solutions-focused bilingual Financial Professional, highly regarded for devising and implementing actionable plans resulting in measurable improvements to customer acquisition and retention, revenue generation, forecasting, and new business development.