Unhappy employees can be detrimental to your business. Not only are they less productive and absent more often but turnover costs can accumulate and make it difficult to recover.
Lucky for you, improving morale doesn’t have to cost a fortune.
The following are 7 affordable ways to boost your support team’s morale.
1. Recognize individual employees
This is simple, and it works well. Praise your employees at staff meetings, or take the time to thank them in a handwritten note. The important thing is that employees know that you notice and appreciate their hard work.
Employee recognition does not have to stay within the office walls. Create a program that celebrates outstanding staff accomplishments.
Try challenging employees to devise an innovative and cost-effective way to promote the company. Then, choose one of the suggestions and implement the idea. Announce the winner at a staff meeting and award the creator with a prize.
2. Show employees the results of their hard work
Share thank you notes and positive reviews from customers with your staff. Better yet, ask clients to meet and personally thank the employees who service their account.
By reminding employees about the meaning their work has by seeing its impact directly through the eyes of the people they are engaging with, it serves as a tremendous boost to morale, confidence, and satisfaction.
3. Give employees responsibility
All your employees can point out inefficiencies in your organization, but not all feel empowered to do so. Listen to employees to learn what gets in the way of the work they want to do and involve them in the process to eliminate barriers.
4. Make sure top management is available
People need to feel that their work and opinions are valued. We all need to feel like we’re genuinely a part of something larger than ourselves to do what we do, stay loyal and go the extra mile.
Spend time talking with individual employees, asking questions, and soliciting ideas.
5. Offer training
One of the top reasons employees leave a company is the lack of development opportunities. Make sure to provide your employees with professional, effective training in order to boost morale.
This begins by partnering new employees with more-seasoned veterans, bringing in experts for training sessions, and paying for employees to attend local trade conferences.
Your best employees will continue to demand professional development opportunities that help them grow. Yet, most companies take the short-sighted view of cutting those programs when financials are tight. Be wary of taking away these benefits.
6. Give small perks with big personal impact
In addition to providing training, reward staffers with perks that make a difference in their employees’ lives.
New Belgium Brewing Co. in Colorado rewards each employee with a new bicycle after a year of employment, and it encourages employees to ride by providing on-site showers and bicycle maintenance supplies. Of its 320 employees, more than half the staff rides to work in the summer.
7. Ask employees what motivates them
Though the list above will certainly help bolster the morale of many employees, one of the most important things is to ask what motivates them. Sit down with each employee and have a conversation about what they value.
The outcome of these sessions is often a list of ideas you hadn’t thought of. Implementing them will make employees feel even more appreciated and typically, help get the ideas launched.
Whichever methods you implement, remember to do so out of genuine interest and concern for your employees. Employees will recognize forced office socials and cheap thoughtless gifts as such, and this can cause more damage than the good.
Yo Noguchi is an experienced freelancer, guest blogger, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, one of the world’s global email marketing software services.
