6 Tips for Lifting Staff Morale

A key component of morale is rewarding and recognizing employees. Following are some great tips for improving morale in almost any situation:

1. To combat  negativity,  brainstorm with your team  on all of the possible  positive outcomes or opportunities that  might result from the situation.
2. To combat  fear of failure,  share  any of your failures  with your team  and ask for suggestions on how to solve the problem  or how you should  have handled the situation differently.  You may learn something important, and your team  won’t be afraid to share  their failures  with you.
3. Create an achievements box and have everyone contribute by describing significant wins: customer service stories,  great sales results, projects  completed, personal  accomplishments, etc.  Read these  out at weekly team  meetings, and to encourage participation, have random  drawings for movie tickets, chocolates,  or bottles  of wine. People  forget the positives  if you fail to re-live them.
4. Truly connect with your employees  by discovering their dreams  and helping  them  achieve  them.
5. Create a positive feedback board where people  can post emails  or other correspondence with praise  from internal  or external  clients. Make sure employees  share  the correspondence with you so you can post it if they don’t.
6. Look for ways to create  a fun atmosphere in the office: morning teas  or coffee breaks  to celebrate successes; divide into teams and have lunchtime or end-of-day  games  like a golf-putting competition or throwing tennis  balls into a rubbish  bin; have theater nights  or bowling nights;  have meetings outside  the office; rotate  25  percent of staff to start  an hour later on Mondays. Be innovative and think of fun activities  that  everyone can be involved in.

“Daring ideas are like chessmen  moved forward: they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.”

—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

My hope is that you understand the importance of leaders as positive role models. Whether  it is the moods they display, their attitudes, their passion, or their ability to focus on the positive, they are constantly under the spotlight and their teams will respond in ways that reflect their own demeanor. If you are battling issues of attitude, motivation, and morale, consider the tone you are setting, the culture you’ve built, and what you are doing every day to motivate your team and build morale.

By Ken Wright

You may also be interested in 7 Guidelines to Building a Successful Team

This is an excerpt from my book The People Pill By Ken Wright