Imagine this: you’re an employee at a business. Day-in and day-out, you’re working hard for your boss. Yet in exchange, you feel that you’re are underpaid, unappreciated, constantly stressed, and each day feels like it blends together with the last. Unhappy employees seldom stay at a company for long.
To prevent a situation like this from happening in your business, you need to boost the morale among your employees.
There are plenty of ways to boost employee morale in your company. Some of these ways include:
- Giving their work meaning
- Challenging them
- Recognizing excellence
- Providing benefits
- Having fun
Give Their Work Meaning
Although a big motivation for employees to come to work every day is a paycheck, they don’t want to feel like they’re doing meaningless work.
Some employees can give their own work meaning, but so many of them don’t really think that they, one employee, can have any positive impact. This is especially true when their job duties are further removed from the final product/service.
For example, let’s take an entry-level data entry clerk. Typing numbers into spreadsheets all day doesn’t sound like the most fulfilling job on the planet. Morale can quickly drop if employees are stuck in their workspaces all day doing meaningless work.
To fix this, talk to your employees more, give them positive feedback, and let them know how impactful their work is. Without coming off as a micromanager, try to walk around the office or store and check up on your employees. Get to know them a little bit. Show genuine appreciation for what they do, even if it’s just filling out spreadsheets. By showing employees the importance of their work as well as your appreciation, you’ll be rewarded with a happier workforce.
Challenge Your Employees
Many once-exciting jobs can become mundane as employees become adept at performing their role. Once they feel less challenged, they’ll start to become bored. This boredom will lead to a lack of satisfaction with their job and decreased performance. If you notice employees seem bored or lethargic at work, that may be a sign they need to try something new.
Assigning reasonably challenging tasks to your employees may be just what they need to become motivated by their work again.
When you entrust your employees with new, challenging tasks, you’re signaling to them that you have faith in their ability to produce results. As an employee, there are few things more powerful than your boss entrusting you with important work. To consistently challenge your employees, you must have a strong understanding of their individual skills and abilities. That way, you can create projects for them that are challenging but doable.
This doesn’t mean create busywork or give out tasks that are way beyond their skills levels. Doing either of those things will just demotivate your employees further, dropping overall employee morale in the process. The key is to create challenging, meaningful work that is tailored to the employee’s skill set.
Recognize Excellence
Employees work hard every day to grow your business. When they go above and beyond, you need to be recognizing that.
The benefits of recognizing excellence in the workplace cannot be understated. Your employees will want to be recognized for their good work, so they will work harder to nab that coveted spotlight. Aside from the increased employee productivity, your employees will enjoy their jobs more.
Recognition shouldn’t just be in private, either. Make sure that you show off the employee’s hard work publicly. It’s one thing to tell an employee they did a good job while stopping by their workspace, but it’s another thing entirely to let the world know that your employees are intelligent, hard workers.
Here’s an easy way you can recognize employee excellence: Employee of the Month awards! These awards are quite simple. Just draw up a set of criteria for Employee of the Month and let your employees know about the new title. Using Erply’s Every month, you award the title to an employee that displays outstanding work ethic.
Tracking employee performance to determine who should be recognized is much easier with the proper software. Quality products like Erply’s retail software allow you to track various employee metrics. This makes it effortless for you to see which employees are going above and beyond.
Once you start recognizing employees for their hard work, you’ll notice their drive come back to life.
Bring On The Benefits
For many white-collar jobs, the benefits alone are worth thousands of dollars. If you’re running a small operation, however, you may not be able to afford giant health insurance plans. Just because your business is small doesn’t mean you can’t give back to your employees! Benefits don’t have to come only in the form of various insurance plans.
The best benefit that’s fun for the whole company is food! You can go about offering this benefit a couple of ways.
Eating healthily can fall by the wayside during stressful times of the year, as employees have less time to shop for and prepare healthy meals. Their health could suffer, and unhealthy employees are unhappy employees. You can remedy this by providing healthy lunches or dinners every so often during busier times for your business. Employees that have to stay after 5 won’t be as disappointed when they have delicious food in front of them.
If your industry has a more consistent schedule, you could simply hold a weekly luncheon. When lunchtime rolls around, have a restaurant cater to your business. Your employees will be able to decompress and socialize with coworkers over delicious, healthy food.
Food never fails to satisfy.
Have Some Fun
When your employees have been working hard all year to grow your business, it’s only fair that you show them appreciation. What better way to show gratitude to your employees than a party?
The holiday season is just around the corner, and everyone is looking forward to all the festivities. If you don’t have some sort of holiday celebration in place, there’s no better time to start that tradition than the present. It doesn’t have to be anything extravagant or expensive. Everyone could wear ugly holiday sweaters and everyone socializes over drinks after work.
Don’t limit the fun to the holidays either! You can put on all sorts of events throughout the year, like barbecues, golf outings, intra-company competitions, happy hours, and many more.
Make sure you get creative with your fun activities! You can always ask your employees for their input as well. They’ll appreciate that.
Low employee morale can be damaging to your bottom line. When their morale is down the toilet, they’ll be less motivated and unproductive, leading to less output. However, if you start implementing some of these techniques into your business, you can reverse the downward trend in employee morale.
Start using some of these today! It’s a win for everyone.