by Carrie Ricketts

Created on: July 10, 2009

Keeping your staff morale high can be a challenge in these hard economic times. Here are some things that you should consider if you want to increase or keep the morale high in your organization.

Communication - Do you have two way communication with your employees? Can they give ideas and is management communicating effectively to them about the business, how it is doing and how they can contribute? Is management communicating to employees on their performance?

Rewards - Are employees being recognized for their performance and contribute to the organization? If not employees need some sort of recognition for their efforts. Monetary rewards are not the only option. What about mentioning their efforts in the employee newsletter, or giving them a letter of recognition. The recognition must be sincere and they had to have made a real contribution to the organization. If the rewards are given for things that are not really contributing to the organization, then the purpose of a reward system has failed and it can actually cause low morale with your organization.

Values - Does the organization have a set of values and does it hire employees who share those values. For example maybe the organization believes in giving back to their community, if you hire employees who are like minded, they will in turn feel proud to work for a organization that supports the community they live in. Is the organization being environmentally friendly? Do they treat employees well? All of these things go along way towards employee morale. Employees want to feel proud of where they work and they want to believe in what they do.

All of these things go along way towards employee morale and it is important to get your employees feedback on what things they want to see that would increase their morale. Maybe it is just a simple thank you once in awhile for their efforts or maybe they want to organize a community event. Either way happy employees are productive employees.

A good way to find out how your employee morale is, is to conduct an employee satisfaction survey and find out how happy your employee really are. Then work on the areas that they are least happy with and maintain the areas that they are most happy with.The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one and then taking steps to fix the problem. Your employees will be happy that you are taking the steps to fix the issues.

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