Maintaining employee morale and building a great culture are concerns for all companies, even at the best of times. But as many industries transition into a different corporate working model, the usual tricks for creating excitement and developing a strong culture no longer seem to cut it.
A decade or so ago, when companies started recruiting more millennials, they began introducing a greater sense of fun and positive culture into the workplace. This meant creating perks like catered lunches, game rooms, happy hours—even installing nap pods (I’m looking at you, Google!). While these benefits are clearly positive, and can help attract talent, they’re not culture builders per se. Culture is created and maintained by your employees, not your Q2 Field Day event. In a nutshell: if your employees have good morale, it’s likely that positive company culture will follow suit.
But how can you maintain morale and build culture while everyone is working from home, potentially working across several continents? Or worse, burnt out from being in a pandemic for two years?
The answer is a cold brew Kegerator…just kidding ;-)
There are several steps to boosting morale and building culture. But the first, and arguably the most important step, is respect.
Respect for your employees comes in a myriad of forms, but communication and transparency are vital. Clear and honest communication, coupled with transparency across goals, expectations, and areas of improvement, is key to boosting employee morale. Transparency and communication don’t just help promote employee morale, they also help build trust between you and your employees. And by fostering a relationship of mutual respect, you are more likely to get the results you want from your teams faster and with less management. Ultimately, the goal is to treat your employees like the adults they are, with fair, honest and clear communication that gives them the guidance they need to perform their best.
The second step in building a great employee culture is through recognition.
Recognizing your employees for their work is deeply important, especially in large companies where those in highly visible roles often get all the glory, while support roles are sometimes overlooked. Recognizing the work of all your employees goes a long way in building respect between you and your team. It also lets other people in the company see how well your employees are doing, highlighting them as key contributors. This is important to make employees feel valued, and like they are working towards something meaningful, which has been a top-cited reason for so many recent resignations across the Sales industry. By giving employees their well-earned recognition, across the team and company, you create a foundation for their success that lets them continue to grow.
This segues beautifully into our third step, employee development.
Simply put: no one wants to feel like they are in a dead-end job. That’s it. Most people want to grow; they want to learn, and to feel challenged. Stagnation will inevitably lead to your employees quitting for a role that will elevate and challenge them. And don’t be fooled by the word “growth”. This doesn't always mean career progression. For many employees, development and growth can come through new personal challenges—for example, delivering a presentation in front of a group. Giving your employees the opportunity to grow, and to develop personally and professionally, will motivate them to perform; it will encourage continued learning, and ultimately, it will increase their loyalty to the company, leading to overall higher employee retention.
Find out how SalesScreen’s gamification technology can help to address all of these pain points, keeping your sales reps motivated, productive and focused, here.
