How to Keep Employee Morale High

You’ve achieved your goal: You have started your business, found office space, hired staff, and begun production. What now? In order to retain employees, and hire new staff in the future, you must be aware of your business’ work environment, especially when it comes to employee morale. How do you keep it high and sustainable? Read on to find out!

Give Purpose – Play to your employees’ strengths. If your employees do not feel inspired by their work – or at the very least, as if their work has no meaning – then they will lag and find it difficult to produce in ways that help the company run smoothly. Find out what makes each person tick – what sparks and drives each member of your staff – and figure out how to incorporate these findings, whether they be ideas, skills, or talents, into the business structure or that employee’s duties.

Be Consistent – It is important to set expectations for your employees, and to stick to those expectations. Make sure that rewards and demerits are the same across the board for positive and negative occurrences. If two people produce the same great content, they should garner the same reward. If they err in the same manner, then they should receive the same consequences.

Lead by example – Act in the way that you expect your staff to act while representing the company. This can be in any manner of things – in dress, speech, content produced. If you lead by example when putting yourself out there, whether inside the office or outside in your daily life, then your employees will feel a sense of respect and greater purpose when at work.

Be Balanced – Your employees should expect to be paid for the time they work, and you should expect them to work during the times when they are being paid. If you have hours of uncompensated staff meetings per week where little gets done, you are detracting from time that could be spent creating, problem-solving, and producing.

Safety First – No work environment can be considered the best if it does not make your employees feel safe. This does not mean coddling them, but merely making sure that precautions are put in place in order to ensure that your employees are not in danger, whether that be from the job (i.e. hard hats and goggles), or from their peers or higher-ups. Employees should also feel like they have someone or somewhere to go to so that they can air any grievances they have, so that the problems get solved and do not become worse.