Improving employee morale

Improving employee morale benefits everyone involved in a work place. Boosting employee morale means that people will take more pride in their work, call in sick less often and be more productive. Happier employees mean happier employers, since the employer will not lose money due to inefficiency and lost time. Improving employee morale can be accomplished fairly easily.

Most people thrive on feeling appreciated. You can improve employee morale by showing your appreciation in simple ways, such as rewarding an employee by saying, "job well done," or, "thank you for the good work." It is a grave mistake on the part of employers to only interact with their workers when there is a problem.

Another way to show appreciation and boost employee morale is by being friendly and interested in your employees. A warm smile and a sincere query about how one is doing will in turn motivate employees. Knowing people’s names and personalizing the work environment inspires employees to want to help you.

Encouraging social interaction between employees and immediately resolving conflict is another way to improve employee morale. Social events such as office picnics and softball games create a sense of camaraderie between employees. Social interaction positively influences cooperation and a general enthusiasm about coming to work everyday. Isolation, on the other hand, causes depression and a lack of motivation.

Another way to improve employee morale is by offering reward incentives. A job well done might be rewarded with a gift card or a cash bonus. This reward can come as a surprise to the employees who earn it, or it can be announced as a sort of game or contest. Having a goal to work towards that directly benefits the employee can help create enthusiasm, which tends to be contagious.

A very important factor in improving employee morale is the work environment. Psychological research shows that atmosphere greatly and directly affects the motivation level and feeling of well being of the employees in a workplace. When possible, providing comfortable and aesthetically pleasing furniture is one way that researchers suggest to motivate people. Lighting, flowers and artwork can also help improve employee morale.

Obviously, providing a pleasant atmosphere is not always possible, for instance in factories or repair shops. In these types of environments, offering a pleasant break room or relaxation area helps to improve morale. In any work environment, safe and comfortable conditions improve employee morale by giving workers a reasonable sense of security.

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How to increase self esteem of your employees

The ways to increase your staff self-esteem.

• Act as if you have high self-esteem. Your behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and example are a powerful role model for staff members. How you look, talk, present yourself, and act send the most powerful message possible to all staff members.

• Practice personal integrity and fairness. Model it and expect it from others. People who feel they can tell the truth, without fear of reprisal, grow as they experiment and experience success and failure.

• Provide frequent feedback that reinforces what people do well and corrects the approaches that need improvement.

• Learn what staff members feel good and positive about doing. Maximize their opportunity to contribute in these activities.

• Provide assignments that stimulate growth. Ask people to stretch beyond what you have observed them doing in the past. Challenge staff members. Negotiate goals which are realistic, yet a stretch.

• Provide positive reinforcement, rewards, and recognition to reinforce the standards and practices you believe your staff members are capable of achieving.

• Create an environment in which people practice self-responsibility. Show that you trust them to report production numbers, deal with employees who are not contributing to the team effort, and succeed and/or fail at implementing new ideas.

• Demonstrate that it is okay to disagree with the supervisor. Allow the implementation of new ideas, even if they are different than yours. Praise when the approach works and ask the employee to implement more good ideas.

• Provide clear expectations about performance standards to all employees and express your sincere belief that they can meet or exceed these standards.

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Find Your Strengths

How well do you really know yourself? Do you know your strengths? The combination of talents which is the core of your individuality?

When your abilities are really being used in your life and work, you're fulfilled. Happy. You have an enthusiasm and dynamism which is attractive and inspirational to others. You go to work with excited anticipation, not a leaden heart.

When they aren't, you're bored, frustrated, dulled and deadened, maybe feeling life is pointless and purposeless. You're one of the 80% of people who, research suggests, find work is unsatisfying. You don't feel stretched, challenged or appreciated.

So how do you find your personal strengths? You may feel you don't have any. You're just not that good at anything. Maybe so, if you're thinking of things like knowing a foreign language or playing the violin. But these are skills, not talents. The strengths I'm talking about are things which may not be easily described, which you may not have thought of as talents at all.

For instance, you may have good empathy, the ability to sense other people's emotions and understand their point of view. You could be a great arranger and organiser. You could be good at bargaining and making deals. You could be driven by the need to find out why things happen.

You could be fascinated by ideas or collecting facts. You could be brilliant at seeing the big picture. You could be great at communicating. You could have a talent for forming deep and lasting friendships, or for building up a good support network. You could be thrilled by learning. Or by helping others.

Some new research* has identified 34 strengths like these, powerful attributes which express themselves in almost every aspect of our lives. For most of us, there'll be four or five main ones which come together to give us our personal constellation of talents.

These talents can be hard to identify because they aren't things apart from ourselves, like speaking French or being able to ski. Almost, they are us. And because our personal talents come so naturally, we tend not to value them. We take them for granted. There's so little work, effort, learning involved that we feel they're things everyone can do.

In fact, you probably really admire other people's talents -- which you don't have -- and simply fail to recognise your own. Others may see your strong points much more clearly than you do.

Almost any strong character trait you have is a talent. Are you competitive, persistent, responsible, witty, caring, inquisitive, meticulous? What are the adjectives family and friends would use about you? These are talents and abilities which could and should be used.

Negatives can be positively used as well. Roger was a car mechanic who was obsessional about checking. He had used the right spare parts and done everything correctly. Treatment stopped him checking 20 times and encouraged him to develop an excellent system for ensuring everything was correctly done. His obsessional tendency became a strength. Everyone knew that when he fixed a car, it stayed fixed. He was happy and so were his customers.

Look at your yearnings, activities you have always been drawn to from childhood, even if you've never had time or opportunity to express them.

What activities or skills have you learned very easily and naturally, with enjoyment? For example, the world famous artist Matisse never painted till his mother gave him a paintbox when he was 21.

What things give you a real sense of inner satisfaction and achievement, make you feel fulfilled?

What do friends, family, colleagues compliment you for, or take for granted you'll do well?

Looking back, remember some moments when you felt most yourself, most alive.

What are the things you get completely absorbed in, so that you lose track of time?A friend told me that when he was at university, planning an academic career, he yawned and clock watched his way through various holiday jobs. Then he took temporary work in a film studio. On his first day, just when he became aware he was so hungry he thought it must be lunchtime, he saw that in fact everyone was going home. Time had flown, and he had found his lifetime career in a completely unexpected area.

What should you do about your weaknesses? Well, don't feel you "should" be able to do something or other. Don't worry about what people expect of you. Stand back from your weaknesses and don't identify with them. If they get in the way of your life or your talents, work out how to cope with them, manage them or delegate them. Or (very liberating) just stop doing them!

There's a great American expression, "I don't do something-or-other." No excuses, explanations, or apologies. You just don't do it.

The important thing is, don't try to work on a weakness in the hope it'll turn into a talent. It won't. We tend to spend too much time and effort trying to be what we aren't. It's easy to think that the way forward is to work on our failings, brushing up the things we're not good at.
Both school and work push us into this thinking, emphasising remedial classes and training to sharpen up weak areas, describing these as "challenges" or "opportunities for growth". We feel we need to be 'well-rounded'.

But the people you've heard of -- celebrities, achievers, artists, discoverers, creators -- are often not that well-rounded. Instead, they're exceptional in one main arena, and who knows or cares if they're hopeless at putting up shelves, can't add up, hit a ball or make friends easily -- because their energy and focus has flowed into their natural talents.

The real opportunities for growth come from working with the strengths you have got, not the ones you haven't. From identifying your talents and developing a lifestyle and work style which uses them to the maximum. So put the effort where it will really be rewarded ? in developing and training your strengths.

A problem can be if you need to feel you've fought yourself, and won. It's not a success if it hasn't been a struggle. I know someone whose life has been blighted by something his mother taught him, and no-one has ever been able to unteach him since: nothing is achieved without hard work, nothing that comes easily is worth doing. So of course he's backed off from the things he can do easily and well, because they don't feel like work. He's turned away from his talents and wasted a lifetime battering away at things which don't come naturally to him.

It takes courage to fully acknowledge who you really are, not who you, your family, school, friends, colleagues think you are or should be. It takes courage to accept that there are talents you have and talents you don't have. It can take courage to stop spending time trying to strengthen your weaknesses and instead focus on perfecting your talents.

But that is the way forward for each of us. Giving time to your weaknesses can bring you up to average. Give the same time and effort to developing your talents, and you'll be exceptional .

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