7 Proven Ideas for Boosting Company Morale

Sometimes company morale is not great. Employees are down for personal reasons, there’s friction in the office, or simply covid-19 has put a damper on your day-to-day business. In this article, we’ll explore 7 ways to boost your company’s morale.

7 Tips for Improving Company Morale

Below is a collection of a few tips for boosting company morale.

1. Celebrate Successes

When we’ve got our heads down in the trenches, we can sometimes forget how far we’ve come, what we’ve accomplished, or that we have a great team fighting for our company’s success. It’s important to stop and celebrate those achievements.

Milestones in a company, employment anniversaries, or just a celebration that we’ve made it though a global pandemic can all have a positive impact on your company. Maybe there’s someone you’d like to recognize? Perhaps they were early to virtual calls, asked good questions, or were self disciplined while working from home? Maybe someone brought in a new customer, had a great idea, or brought a new perspective to a meeting? There are many reasons to honor your team. Find the one that fits your organization the best and celebrate!

2. Employee-source company outing ideas

We’ve all been stuck at home for the last few months, so having a bonding activity with the team can help boost spirits. A great way to figure out what activities your team may enjoy the most (hiking, bowling, frisbee, a picnic, etc) is to Employee-Source the idea. Ask your team to make suggestions, hold a brainstorming meeting, or create a series of polls.

This puts the ball in your employees’ court and allows your team to have a collective input so the outing feels more like a collaborative effort rather than an assigned “team building” exercise.

3. Get rid of the Negative Nancy’s

There may be someone on your team that has lost a bit of perspective; everything to them seems gloomy. Ideally, you’d love to help by getting to the bottom of their concern, but sometimes there’s a limit to amount of time you can put in. Consider doing one of the following;

Have a long 1 on 1 - Try your best to just listen and ask good questions; you are hoping to create a space so that employee can feel heard and understood, not lectured.

Reassign that Teammate to Other Tasks- Having another set of responsibilities may reshape the perspective of your upset employee. Sometimes people get into ruts, and the only way out is to create space from the tasks that person was working on, and work on something else.

Let Someone Go- If all else fails, having the guts to put the team ahead of a single person may be necessary. Having a teammate work against their peers can cause the rest of the team to turn sour. Not every employee or employment is a lifetime commitment, and sometimes it’s best to create a better opportunity for everyone.

4. Streamline Promotion Tracks

Having clear stepping stones and goals in life can make a big difference to your teams morale. This is true in business as well, and not having a clear promotion track, timeline, and/or qualifications can drive your morale down. Spend some time thinking through some clear qualifications for what your team needs to move up the ladder. Promotions help employees feel like they are accomplishing something.

Another idea is to create more smaller promotions within a hierarchy structure. This allows for smaller, incremental promotions so that your employee can feel like they are advancing as they go. Ask yourself how many years of experience is between your current hierarchy structure. Is it 5 years or 15? See if there is something in-between that can be developed.

Employees also like to be compensated better financially. That may be a hot topic for many business leaders, but if you value your team, you should show it monetarily.

5. Consider work from home days

We just experienced something a little strange; the majority of the world’s workforce just spent the last few months working from home. To some, this was a nightmare, but to others, this may have been an epiphany.

We all work a bit different and have different preferences. Some of us are eager to get back into the office, but some of us realize that we discovered something a little unexpected; we don’t mind sleeping in a little longer, saving on the commute, and being able to work in the comfort of our own home.

According to a study from Stanford, employees who work from home saw a 13% performance increase in their output. This may be something you can use to help your team feel better appreciated. If you honor their preference of working from home, life may be more enjoyable for everyone.

6. Use Better Communication Tools : Notion, Airtable, Monday

There are several great digital tools that can help your teams better organize and communicate. Consider transitioning some of your projects from Word or Excel to an online collaboration tool like Notion, Airtable, or Even Monday. Keeping up with the most current version of a project can be a nightmare, and having a project management tool that can help you see the big picture with your projects is very beneficial.

7. Webcasts for Exciting communication

Hopefully your company already has a strong plan for communicating with your team, expressing core values, or simply updating your team throughout the year.

Many companies use town hall meetings, quarterly meetings, or thought leadership events to encourage communication and unity for their organization. All of these events (and more) can be further amplified with a webcasts by allowing worldwide attendance without having to pay for flights, hotels, or other travel expenses, real time communication through live Q&A’s, and an archive of your event for teammates who are not available during the broadcast.

Our team at Corporate Streams specializes in these types of events. If you want to learn more about creating exciting webcasts for your corporate culture, explore our live events page.