7 Ways Staff Morale Goes South

Staff morale is the confidence, enthusiasm, and satisfaction of people in the workplace, and it is the collective morale rather than the morale of individuals that is critical to the operational health of a business. We all know that ‘one rotten apple can spoil the barrel’ but what we do not all know is that employees are not the cause of low morale; low morale is the symptom of poor or mediocre environmental, procedural, and cultural working conditions.

A sustainable high level of moral in the workplace is critical to the success of any business. It directly impacts productivity and profitability, the business’s market share and its market resilience. Low morale plays out in innumerable ways including the loss of social niceties, people feeling defensive and playing the blame game, bullying becomes a common occurrence, absenteeism rises, and staff retention rates become compromised, and customers feel neglected and unloved.

Here are 7 key contributors to low morale and a solution that may help you in this area:

1. Poor leadership. One way to avoid poor leadership is to refrain from promoting a top worker into a place of leadership with no management training and mentoring.

2. Inadequate working conditions. Ensuring that you are meeting your health and safety legal obligations will give you a great start to improving workplace conditions.

3. Workplace isolation. We spend most of our awake hours at work and feeling isolated for lengthy periods of time is unhealthy so buddy new hires up with a suitable more established teammate and allow them to spend time together working and on breaks.

4. Insufficient training and the provision of tools. Repeatedly ask your workers if they need or would like workplace training or self-development and are there any tools they are lacking or that would improve their efficiency.

5. Inadequate remuneration and benefits. It is a false economy and an extremely poor moral decision to pay workers as little as possible for their efforts. Engage the rule of reciprocity watch as your workers perform above their pay rate.

6. Racism, sexism, ageism. Gone are the days of the isms, it is poor form to practice any of them and doing so indicates business leadership immaturity.

7. Lack of empathy. If an employee feels undervalued and that they are nothing more than a means to an end your low employee retention rates, and high absenteeism rates will reflect this. The solution to this is to simply start by valuing them as people who are in fact your biggest asset and incidentally your most underutilised resource.

If the collective morale of your employees is less than great you may want to reach out to us.