You enter into your office with high hopes to start your day on a high, but you bumped into a toxic co workers who starts to demoralize you. It will not only spoil your mood but your entire days as you keep thinking about it throughout the day. When your morale is down, your productivity takes a hit and you end up falling behind the daily productivity goals.
Unlike traditional business owners, successful entrepreneurs know the importance of keeping their employees motivated. That is the reason why they go above and beyond to ensure that their team is motivated, focused and their morale sky high.
Here is how best Successful entrepreneurs keeps the morale of their employees up.
Stay Focused on Your Mission
Nadia Boujarwah, CEO and co-founder Dia &Co, a customized clothing store that creates attire for your body and budget thinks that you should always keep your mission at the back of your mind. Here is what she said, “We’re all about our customers. We serve the millions of women who have been underserved by retail their whole lives.”
She further adds, “We’re constantly collecting stories from our customers about how our service has impacted them, and we share those stories in a dedicated Slack channel and in a daily email that goes out to our entire company. These are valuable resources to tap into when we want a morale boost. Those stories deliver inspiration whenever it’s needed.”
Work It Out
Even if your company is going through a lean patch and things are not going your way, you should look for ways to get out of this problem. Think out of the box and come up with unique ideas to rejuvenate your employees. Here is what Richer Power CEO did.
Iva Pawling, CEO and co-founder of Richer Power shares her experience, “We’ve been through a few transitions recently, which put a strain on our company culture. To get us realigned, we decided to do a fitness challenge. For the month of May, we scheduled fitness classes with our team and offered weekly incentives like gift cards, an extra vacation day and some cold, hard cash. We created a private Instagram to keep each other accountable. It really bonded the team together. And healthy employees equal a healthy work environment.”
Plan in Advance
Ever heard about the common adage, “Prevention is better than cure”? It is usually associated with health-care but most people don’t realize that it also works when it comes to boosting the morale of your employees. Planning will help you overcome such issues and an online task management software can help you in planning.
Daniel Clark, CEO of Brain.fm said, “We practice team bonding twice a week in the form of ‘Questions’ and ‘Shoutouts.’ Questions is a simple game where someone asks a personal question that can’t be answered with a yes or no; Shoutouts is about gratitude, where every team member expresses something they really liked that another member did in the past week. It helps build a community of people who work hard and get recognized for it”
Rally Together
Things can significantly improve if there is someone to pick you up when you are feeling down. Teams should rally each other and together. If your plans and strategies are not working, you should call a meeting which is attended by all the team members and discuss about the solution instead of blaming each other for poor performance.
Eran Zinman, co-founder and CTO of Monday.com provides a great solution for overcoming declining employee morale. He said, “When morale is low, it’s usually because of a challenge that’s affecting us all as a company. Maybe projection numbers are low or certain strategies aren’t working as well as we’d hoped. We find the most effective thing to do is to bring everyone in to become part of the solution. We empower the team with all the information possible and encourage them to come up with and execute potential solutions. The team’s spirit is often lifted knowing we’re all in it together”
Open Up Communication
Establish a two-way communication channel and be open and accessible to employee. Encourage employees to speak up and create a workplace culture where every employee shares their opinion freely. Once you can remove that barrier, your employee’s morale stays up because they will share everything with you and you will be aware about what is hampering your employee morale.
Chris Terrill, CEO of ANGI Home services said, “I find it’s not difficult situations or choppy business performance that tends to drag down morale. It’s a lack of communication. Perception of tough times is often much more damning than reality. I try to lay out the situation in direct terms and walk through how the team will not only survive but thrive down the road. Then I look for a rallying cry, like a new product launch, to keep everyone focused and to use as a celebratory moment for future success.”
Investigate the Problem
It is important for businesses to know where the problem lies so they can eradicate it to lift employee morale. That is why they should investigate the problem and try to fix the issue as soon as possible before it can dent the productivity of your team. Here is how CEO of Kombrewcha handles it.
Garrett Bredenkamp, CEO of Kombrewcha said, “To understand causes of problems, we have a semiannual engagement survey our whole team takes. We talk about lowest-scoring parts of our culture and use a sticky-note exercise to let the team express why they feel that way. Recently we made some hard personnel decisions, and this exercise helped us realize that leadership hadn’t communicated well. We fixed it, and things improved. We finish with a social event — it’s a benefit of running an alcoholic beverage company!”
How do you keep your employee morale high? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.