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Focus on Employee Morale to Improve Your Company

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happy employees

Summary: Keeping a high morale among your workforce will result in a dedicated and efficient workforce.

Talented employees will stay because they are paid well, appreciated, listened to, promoted, involved in decisions, mentored, and challenged. As the human resources department, you are responsible for keeping up and maintaining a healthy morale.

When one hears morale, a range of ideas of its meaning may come to mind. The generally understood and accepted definition of morale is the mental attitude or mindset of an individual or group’s feeling of unity and acceptance. Using this definition, morale is seen as the presiding emotion that dictates an organization’s employee performance levels. Morale affects enthusiasm, voluntary conformance with regulations and orders and willingness to cooperate with co-workers to accomplish the company’s mission. A low morale will result in discouragement, insubordination, and dissatisfaction with the job, company and fellow associates.

Determining where the morale is can be tricky. There are countless factors affecting morale so pinpointing which one is the culprit is not always obvious. You will know when morale is low when employees miss more work and there are more accidents and grievances filed because the employees are avoiding their responsibilities. Management will need to step in to settle the disruptions and get things moving back in the correct direction.

Another way of figuring out where the morale of your team stands is to have them take an anonymous survey. Directing asking them how satisfied they are with their job, their tasks, and how they feel about everything is the fastest way to find out what is causing morale to drop. Surveys also allow employees to air any other problems they have with management. If they are unwilling to say anything is wrong but you know there is, then you will know a problem is the relationship between management and the workforce.

There are different surveys that you can hand out, including objective, descriptive, and projective. Objective surveys ask questions to the employees but management representatives write the answers so the employees are not fully able to express how they feel. Descriptive surveys ask employees to write their answers to the questions asked, allowing for the true feelings of the employee to show. Projective surveys are sometimes portrayed as psychological tests to reveal hidden feelings from employees reluctant or afraid to tell how they feel.

With so much depending on having a good morale to keep your top employees around, you need to provide things that will keep morale up. The employees want to see fair compensation for their position and a bonus; safe, secure, and overall pleasant working conditions; being treated with dignity; efficient and amiable leadership; fair working hours; economic security; and a way to express their views for future improvement.

Managers view the effects of morale slightly different. They want good morale because it helps maintain cooperation from their employees, allows a stability of position occupancy, increases productivity, keeps a loyalty among workers, and results in a low cost per unit.

As management, it is very important that problems with morale be addressed immediately. The chain reaction of bad morale can be fatal for a company. It may take going above and beyond to bring morale up and force it to stay up long enough to carry itself.

Do you think morale is that big of a deal to a company and its workforce? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

To learn more about employee retention, read these articles:

Photo: flickr.com

Focus on Employee Morale to Improve Your Company by
Authored by: Amanda Griffin