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Picture credit: fdecomite
It’s been another hard year for the business community and I don’t know anybody that feels relaxed about their prospects for the forthcoming year.
We need to think seriously about how we sustain staff morale not only for the Christmas partying but also for the difficult times ahead.
In my experience, staff morale is one of the greatest unmeasured performance indicators – and yet it is one of the most influential success factors in any business. Show me a thriving company and I’ll bet that strong morale plays a leading part in their success.
Strangely though, nobody has ever asked me to report regularly on the morale within my department. Is it because we think that we can gauge morale simply by tracking the numbers of monthly “Leavers and Joiners,” rather than by asking the straightforward question “how is the team spirit of the department?”
a new key performance indicator
Perhaps I’ve identified a new objective for our management scorecard: to facilitate a happy workforce. Now that would be a really interesting Key Performance Indicator. And a serious challenge.
three suggestions for sustaining morale in difficult times
- mutual support – this is a two-way street and we all need to do our part
- extra sensitivity for others – we will all be under extra pressures, within and beyond the workplace
- have more fun
having more fun
In the present economic climate we need all of the laughs we can get. So let’s start by putting a bit of sparkle back into our everyday work, wherever we can. It’s quite easy when you start to think about it – there are all sorts of opportunities for “tweaking” things slightly to put people in a better mood – and not just for the holiday season.
Whatever you do, I hope that you thoroughly enjoy yourselves and don’t forget to include the shift workers, the field workers and the home-workers – these are three very important groups that are easily overlooked when arrangements are being made.
From a purely business management perspective, I can’t think of a more cost-effective way to spend our time – in the cause of team-building.
Have a great Christmas everybody. We’ve earned it…
Do you think that we pay enough attention to staff morale throughout the year?
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My quick answer as always is, it depends…. When I was doing the IT thing fulltime, it boiled downto fear of losing your job, to stay in line with corporate policy. A necessarily team destroying concept, as it were. Therefore I can only imagine what it’s like now, with economic woes thrust on top of that….