Taking your entire staff to Disneyland or Vegas (depending on the staff) is a simple and reliable way to boost everyone’s morale but at what cost? First of all, the costs surrounding this would be gigantic and you’d have to take a collective leave, causing an even more expensive overhead while you’re at it. As an entrepreneur, you’re boosting morale to make your office into a more pleasant work environment and in this way achieve an amazing ROI, not boosting it for the sake of morale itself. With this in mind, here are five methods that are just perfect for what you’re looking for.
A cake for personal milestones
The first thing you need to keep in mind is that personal milestones need to be commemorated. By this, we mean birthdays and anniversaries. The reasons why getting a cake is such a good idea is due to the fact that it makes everyone feel special while putting one person in the spotlight. Handwritten letters don’t have the same effect, seeing as how they focus on the individual while doing nothing for the rest of your staff.
Fire the emotional vampire
Have you ever noticed how some people are simply bad to be around? The term most commonly used for this type of people is emotional vampires. The problem with identifying and firing these people lies in the fact that they’re not necessarily underperforming or even actively harming your brand. But indirectly, they’re making the lives of people around them miserable and, if the claim that a happy employee works 12 percent better is true, they’re about to lose you a small fortune in the future.
Give out an award
The thing about awards is that it gives a temporary boost to its recipient. First, it gives the person bragging rights (unofficially), which, on its own creates a strong incentive for your employees to work extra hard. Next, it gives them something to display on their desk in the office, which maximizes their effect, seeing as how it creates a temporary stimulus. This is particularly useful if you decide to make stylish corporate awards with this purpose in mind from the start. Lastly, it creates an atmosphere of friendly competition around the office, giving everyone an incentive to work harder in order to get the next one.
Leave early on Fridays
The importance of the weekend cannot be stressed enough and it’s only a myth that only people who don’t love their job look forward to Fridays. Everyone needs a day off and everyone has something better to do on Friday afternoon. So, if you already noticed that work is kind of slow on Fridays, why not use this seemingly negative trend to your benefit and allow people to leave early on Fridays? You would be surprised at just how much this can do for the overall brand loyalty.
Weekly thank you email
At the end of the day, this particular method is especially effort-intensive, yet, the boost it provides is hard to argue against. What you need to do is send a weekly thank you email to your staff, notifying them of all the progress you’ve made over the course of the last week. Still, a generic thank you won’t cut it. You need highly individualized emails praising every single individual on your staff for the exact task they’ve performed well over the course of the previous week. In this way, they can rest assured knowing that their hard work is not going unnoticed.
Conclusion
One of the things that all of the above-listed trends have in common is frugality. Moreover, they’re not dependent on the industry, making them universally available for all entrepreneurs out there, regardless of their field or business size.
Dan Miller is a Payments officer with nearly ten years of experience in banking and international payments in the Australian banking sector. He has a masters degree in finance and banking. He is married and also a father of a beautiful little girl.