Employee Morale
LindaS
1,510 Posts
We have a real problem with employee morale...
Our office staff has not seen a pay increase in over seven years due to the financial status of the company. We have cut our staff by 25% in the past year and have distributed the duties to the remaining staff members. The majority of these people have 4+ years of vacation due to their years of service with the company.
I am seeing a significant increase in low morale. People making statements about how they "hate" coming to work, disgust about the way the upper management personnel keep their offices (unclean and untidy), etc. It gets worse by the day and here I sit, trying to maintain a positive attitude but I get hit from both the plant employees as well as the office staff. I am where these people come to "vent".
My question is what can I do to get things turned around? Upper management is aware that there is a problem but not the extent of it. They cannot afford to give pay increases, although they have made statements to certain individuals that there may be increases in the future but these statements have been being made for years so there isn't any trust in those statements.
Looking for some assistance as it is getting harder and harder to come here with a positive attitude each day.
Thanks.
Our office staff has not seen a pay increase in over seven years due to the financial status of the company. We have cut our staff by 25% in the past year and have distributed the duties to the remaining staff members. The majority of these people have 4+ years of vacation due to their years of service with the company.
I am seeing a significant increase in low morale. People making statements about how they "hate" coming to work, disgust about the way the upper management personnel keep their offices (unclean and untidy), etc. It gets worse by the day and here I sit, trying to maintain a positive attitude but I get hit from both the plant employees as well as the office staff. I am where these people come to "vent".
My question is what can I do to get things turned around? Upper management is aware that there is a problem but not the extent of it. They cannot afford to give pay increases, although they have made statements to certain individuals that there may be increases in the future but these statements have been being made for years so there isn't any trust in those statements.
Looking for some assistance as it is getting harder and harder to come here with a positive attitude each day.
Thanks.
Comments
Hanging on through 7 years of this sort of financial difficulty sounds like a tremendous feat. Perhaps you can build on the perserverence and stubborness underlying that tenacious survival attitude.
When it comes right down to it, does the company have a solid business plan to turn things around? Without that as a solid foundation, it would be difficult to convince me that the future holds anything different.
The mess you see in the offices is probably reflecting the attitude or personality of your company's leader(s). If change does not come from the top, it is very difficult to instigate it from lower levels.
Perhaps a frank discussion with leadership can impress upon them that morale is in a dwindling spiral and unless some drastic change is made, production will continue to decrease and turnover will increase, both of which will put more downward pressure on your bottom line.
It might be time to share the plan with management and determine what portions of it can be shared with the EE base.
Hope is not a strategy, but without it, I don't see a change coming.
Good luck.
Have pot luck lunches with a theme. Mexican, Italian, American, etc. or when you local sports team is going to be playing on a Friday, have a game day where employees come dressed in the sports team logo items have employees bring in hot dogs and hamburgers and pasta salad. Maybe you could afford to buy a small grill or someone could volunteer to bring one.
Encourage management to straighten up their areas and offer to help each individually "get organized". You could organize the office administrators and you could do a consultation on each office. Work together to get things filed and organized and show a little team effort to help the management become more efficient and successful.
Put up a brag board. Employees can pin up pictures of their kids and pets and new homes or cars. They can put up copies of their kids math test where they got a 100%!
Get local retailers and businesses to give your employees discounts on their services or items. Have a mobile car wash unit come to the office, a dry cleaning service, a lunch cart, mobile massage, etc.
Have small contests and give employees a free paid day off. Contests don't have to be work related you could do a guess who picture contest where people bring in their baby pictures and you have to guess whose who. Someone who gets them all right can win something. And it doesn't have to be signficant.
Have an ice cream party. It's almost summer - kick off the summer with an ice cream or beach party. Let employees wear shorts and a Hawiian shirt to work and buy a box of lais to hand out.
There are a lot of fun things you can do to boost morale. Money isn't what motivates most people. It's a fun work environment, a good management team and a sense of accomplishment and achievement.
Maybe if you start improving the morale of management by getting them organized and offering a few perks like a dry cleaning service, this will spread througout the company.
Besides the fun things like potlucks, contests, ice cream sundae parties, etc., here are some of the recognition things we've done: We put a "Kudos" section on our intranet where employees can publicly praise or thank each other for jobs well done, large and small. Also, many of our staff are semi-starving musicians, artists, actors, etc. so our "brag board" consists of a place where our staff can post news of their gigs, plays, exhibitions, etc.
For input, we also used our intranet for an electronic suggestion box. People have suggested things like bicycle racks, and we've provided them for minimal expense.
But the thing I most want to recommend is community service. There is nothing like helping someone who is unemployed/sick/homeless/whatever to make you appreciate that you have sort of steady employment and soundness of mind and body (well, that last one's always a little iffy....). Here are some things our Morale Task Force has organized for us to do:
1. We deliver Meals on Wheels in two-person teams. We staff two routes per week, with each team only having to deliver about once a month.
2. We sponsor a needy family each Christmas, and take up a collection among staff to buy the family gift cards from WalMart and a major grocery store so that they can select their own gifts and holiday meals.
3. We manned a water station at the major marathon that ran past our workplace recently.
We, too, have had major cutbacks, RIFs, no raises, etc. for the past couple of years, but most of these things take little to no money. They haven't touched everyone, because some people are just immune to having their morale improved, but I think they've helped. Good luck!