by Deborah Millhouse
If you could find the cause of employee morale, I’m sure you’d bottle and sell it. On the other hand, if you are looking for a root cause of poor employee morale within your company, you need to take a glance into the mirror. Nine times out of ten, poor employee morale is caused by something the employer has done or continues to do.
Employee morale stems from company culture. Whether morale is low or high, it is almost exclusively a top-down phenomenon. When you as an employer fail to gain the trust and respect of your employees, morale will be lowered. When management is unable to clearly and effectively communicate with the workforce, morale sinks even further. Give the perception of unfairness, of one employee or class of employee being treated worse or better than his or her peers, and employee morale might as well not be one of your vocabulary terms.
Want to boost morale in your workplace? Your workforce must respect and trust you. You can achieve these things by fostering pride and a sense of excellence in the workplace. That has to do with your company culture, and is a process that must be begun in the interview, before orientation and before the hire. You need top-down and bottom-up buy-in when it comes to that sense of pride in your company’s services. You can also gain employees’ respect and trust by treating everyone fairly both in terms of reward and in terms of discipline. Creating that sense of camaraderie in your workplace will create an environment where productivity is a priority. That’s enough to raise anyone’s morale.
