Giving Your Employees Morale Booster Options
It’s no secret that giving employees morale booster options in your workplace can help your company thrive. When employees are happy at work, they tend to be more motivated and productive. Happy employees take pride in the culture they surround themselves with. The eLeaP People Success Platform, which includes a continuous performance management system, provides organizations with powerful options to attract and retain high-caliber team members.
You can only achieve high morale in your workplace by giving your employees morale booster opportunities on a regular basis. Of course, you’ll need to have some options for morale boosters. Let’s look at some of the best options proven to boost morale.
Great Options for Your Employees Morale Booster Opportunities
Employees tend to respond to attempts at boosting morale differently. Because of this, it’s important to have a variety of morale booster options for your employees to take part in. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Make One-On-Ones a Priority
Communication is crucial to have high morale in the workplace. Your employees want to feel like they have someone they can come to with concerns or ideas. One great way to foster an environment that encourages this type of communication is by hosting regular one-on-one sessions with everyone.
A stunning 82% of workers say that they feel like they have the right amount of support at work when they have at least a weekly one-on-one meeting with a manager. Of course, management has its own responsibilities as well, so it’s important to come up with a good process for these meetings.
Create a structured formula for your one-on-one meetings with each employee. It can also help to schedule the time out on a daily basis so it becomes part of your routine. Remember that you don’t need to meet with your whole team daily, so it can be easier to spread out the meetings as you need.
Weekly one-on-ones don’t have to be particularly long, either. Having ten to 15 minutes set aside per week for each employee is a great starting point where you can adjust up or down as needed.
Let’s say you have a team of 20 employees. If you work a typical five-day workweek, that means you would need to meet with four employees per day to meet with everyone weekly. Fifteen minutes per employee means you only need to set aside an hour of your day for these check-ins. Sacrificing an hour daily to boost morale is well worth it!
Let Your Employees Request Feedback
The normal feedback process looks like a performance review where management tells employees how they’re performing compared to the expectations of their job. Many feedback sessions are reviewing the work performance overall instead of specific areas. This type of approach can cause your employees to be less receptive to the feedback you give.
On the other hand, if your employees can ask you for feedback on specific areas, it can help create an environment of wanted feedback. When your employees are able to ask for feedback, they can get insight into how they’re performing in areas they’re focused on or passionate about. This allows you to provide relevant and actionable feedback.
With requested feedback, your employees will be much more likely to put in the effort to improve in the area they asked about. This can help boost both morale and productivity in the workplace. Plus, it helps you tailor feedback to your employee’s long-term career goals.
Make Sure Management Gets Training, Too
Many workplaces focus on training their team members to excel in their areas, which is wonderful. However, this often comes at the cost of neglecting training management. While your managers may have proven themselves with skills in lower-level positions, they need to know how to manage properly as well.
It’s crucial to make sure that every manager in your company knows how to properly coach their team members. When managers focus on coaching and improving individual team members, it can boost morale tremendously.
In order to be a great manager, it’s important to focus on more than just the metrics and numbers involved in the team. Managers should focus on developing individual members of their team to grow into the long-term career goals each person has.
Coaching well includes recognizing strengths and weaknesses, then moving forward with that knowledge. Help your employees showcase their strengths while improving on their weak areas as well. When employees feel they’re in a position they can shine in and are being coached to do so, they’ll be happier overall.
Prioritize Both Personal and Professional Development
Of course, it’s very important to make sure your team has the tools needed to professionally do their job and do it well. This includes providing ample skills training, mentoring, and coaching sessions to recognize skill gaps they may have.
It’s crucial to start with professional development from your employee’s first day on the job. But it’s also important to keep it a priority with your tenured employees as well. Regular skill set checks, refresher courses, and trainings on new changes are vital.
Development doesn’t stop here, though. For properly trained employees, you need to train them personally as well. This means you should also make it a priority to train on soft skills. These are skills like empathy, customer service, communication, and other people skills.
Soft skills are crucial in your employee’s current positions as well as any positions they may hold in the future. Prioritizing personal development can be huge as your employees’ morale booster. This is because it helps them develop skills that are useful whether they’re in your company, another company, or simply working with the public in any capacity.
Soft skills training also helps develop future leaders because high levels of many of these skills are what make great managers.
Appreciation Goes a Long Way
One of the best ways to give your employees a morale boost chances is by showing them how much you appreciate the work they do. The highest-performing teams in the country have high rates of being supportive, appreciative, and vocal about both.
As a leader, it’s imperative that you let your employees know you see what they do on a daily basis and that it makes a difference. When employees feel like you appreciate their effort, their morale and productivity will be much higher.
Appreciation also tends to be highly contagious in the workplace. When you’re regularly recognizing things your employees are doing, not only does it become a habit for you, but it can become a habit for them as well. You’ll likely see employees start to share their appreciation for one another.
Stress is a common experience in the workplace at all levels. Breaking up the monotony of the workday with praise and recognition can go a long way in giving everyone a break from that stress!
Have Fun!
Yes, you’re at work, and you’re the boss. However, that doesn’t mean there’s no fun allowed while on the clock. While there are times to hunker down and do work, there are also times to relax and have fun with your team while working.
Show yourself as approachable by making an effort to connect with your employees. It can be tempting to put on a strict façade when you enter the workplace, but this can actually harm the morale of your team. If you need employees’ morale booster opportunities, be more true to yourself while at work.
When you take time to have fun with your team and show them that you’re a person like them, it can help you seem more relatable and personable. This can help build the trust your team has in you, which can also boost productivity and morale.
Plus, when you come across as human, it can help your employees realize that you see them as humans as well. It’s all too easy to treat the members of your team as just a means to the end of a piece of data on your spreadsheet, either hitting or missing the mark.
The truth is, everyone on your team has so much more to them than what they do at work. They have families, backgrounds, interests, and motivators. While you have to stay professional, it can make a huge difference when you get to know some personal aspects of each of your employees.
Not only that, but then using the knowledge you’ve gained to give employees some fun in the office will help boost morale in impressive ways!
Takeaway
If you need employees’ morale booster ideas, there are many factors to consider. Of course, it’s important to remember that all of your employees are different and will respond to morale boosters in their own ways. This is why it’s a good idea to have a few different practices in place.
When you show that you’re making an intentional effort to boost the morale of your employees, they notice. This can help boost the productivity of your team while also helping you build trust throughout the team. Morale boosters are contagious! When you start implementing them, it’ll surprise you how much of a difference you’ll see!