Morale                                    

Building employee morale

When you have contact with a business where they do the difficult immediately and the impossible takes only a little longer, you are experiencing a business with high morale.

Morale exists when people know their jobs and how their job complements those of everyone else. They focus on working together to accomplish the mission of the business. Another indication of high morale is where people in the organization see action required and willingly sacrifice their goals for the goals of others and the organization. In these businesses the customer does not come first; the customer is first.

The morale of a business allows it to accomplish more than its cumulative talents would suggest. It operates in a synergistic mode using management, employee and customer participation to resolve its problems.

A high morale organizations will hold the characteristics such as below:

First, grant workers more and more responsibility for the performance and quality of their jobs. Empower them to spend company assets, money, to satisfy customer requirements in order to retain them as repeat customers.

 Second, reward workers for exceeding the expectations of their job, contributing to product and service improvements and reducing costs without lowering quality.

 Third, workers, without fear of any reprisal, have the right to have their grievances seriously considered and acted on by management in a reasonable time. Even in high-morale organizations, you can expect people to have differences. When differences arise, the faster you can settle them the lower the disruption to the organization.

Employee morale may range from powerful to destructive. It is the mental attitude employees have toward their company, coworkers and their job. High morale makes everything possible and poor morale makes nothing work right. This makes the development of positive morale a top management priority.

The environment must be right for morale to flourish. No single set of rules or management style will generate the required environment. Therefore, experimentation and building on success will accomplish this goal.

Work on building some of the following ideas into an organization.

 In management's thinking, wages and job security always materialize as a major factor when in reality employees ranked a "full appreciation for the work they do" and the "feeling of being 'in' on things" as the highest motivational factors. Wages are important only when they do not satisfy the basic needs of the worker. Pay a competitive wage and appreciate the worker's accomplishments to build morale.

Management by Objectives is a way to improve employee motivation. By allowing the employees to set their own objectives, they gain ownership of the objective and by having ownership they make it work. Setting up the evaluation process simultaneously lets them know in advance how management will evaluate their progress.

In the early of 1950, a typical MBO program has been first time introduced by a businessman called Peter Drucker, his opinion show that :

1. The employee meets with his or her superior to discuss description of the job.
2. Short-term performance goals are set by both the employee and the superior.
3. Regular meetings between employee and superior monitor the progress toward goals with intermediate checkpoints set to measure progress.
4. At the end of the period, superior and employee meet. Together they evaluate the results of the employee's work.

Quality of personal and work-life keeps becoming more and more important to workers. Workers have learned the value of money. Its value is what you can purchase with it, not its stated value. This brings a new factor into locating the business. Recreational and leisure facilities boost morale for the worker and these good feelings are transferred into the work environment.

Redesign the work to give the employees more authority to plan and decide how they will accomplish their work. Allow them to learn related skills or to trade jobs with others. Today we call this job enlargement -- the simple expansion of a worker's assignment to include additional but similar tasks.

You can build morale with flexible work scheduling. Since work is only a part of life, scheduling flexibility is an asset to the worker. Try compressed work weeks that involve scheduling work so employees spend fewer days on the job but work the same number of hours. Employees value job sharing and allowing them to work at home at the time they choose.

Businesses with a high morale factor have a competitive edge over other businesses. It is not a superior product or service offering, nor is it related to material things. It cannot be overcome with lower prices. It is an intangible feeling transmitted from each employee to every other employee and to the customer. It makes the customers respond with repeat orders.

                                                 Main ...........  Internet Accountability .........  Morale ......... Employee Benefits

                                                        Recognition ...  Community volunteer work .....  Office Design ...  Smart Notes ...  Productivity

Copy Right ® Year 2000 By 1 Hour Full House All Right Reserve