WITH the continuing threat of the different variants of the Covid-19 virus plus the rising cost of fuel, organizations have adopted either a hybrid or a work-from-home setup. But whether you ask your team to work from home or to report to the office, it has now become increasingly more difficult to boost their morale considering that interactions can more often become more transactional than conversational. And with that, several organizations have reported employees leaving the organization for companies offering flexible and adaptive work setups.
While work setups do not primarily dictate if people stay in an organization, it can become a big factor in their decision to leave. As a people manager, you need to be aware of how your team responds to these changes and how your organization reacts, because it will dictate how many of them will stay and what you can do to prevent them from looking for the proverbial greener pastures. More often than not, people look for work elsewhere because they think this organization or that would provide a better working environment for them.
First thing you need to do is to identify what your team considers as a good working environment. As management guru Peter F. Drucker once said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” Organizational experts have long been discussing how culture can be measured and they all agree that there is no objective way of measuring it—but there are indicators to show if an organization has achieved its culture goals. These include norms and practices, interpersonal interactions, and behaviors expressing corporate core values, among others.
This begs the question of whether the team should adapt to the culture of the entire organization, or should they retain their own? I think that as long as your team delivers what is expected from them, your role as their people manager is to ensure that they continue to be consistent, and to manage how your team interacts with other departments. After all, while an organization needs to be unified, it does not have to be uniform.
You also need to provide opportunities for your team to decide on their own by empowering them. The key here is to lessen micromanaging and focus more on communicating the team’s goals clearly so your team can have creative license to look for the best way of achieving them. Your team needs to understand that they can be trusted and relied on to support the achievement of the team’s goals. A colleague once said that people go to work so they can find meaning in what they are doing, and to contribute significantly to their team. When you explicitly trust your team to do their work the best way they know how, they will strive to safeguard that trust.
And when they fail, take it as a way to practice the growth mindset where failure is viewed as a learning opportunity. This will help your team appreciate the experience and strive to do better next time. Of course, this is helpful if you have the luxury of time and learning opportunities are closely monitored. For urgent matters requiring quick decision-making, as their team leader you need to step up and guide the team every step of the way. Nothing discourages a team more than a leader who fumbles during an emergency. Clear thinking and decisive instructions help motivate your team to action.
I have written about this several times already, but this remains to be an effective way of motivating and boosting the morale of your team: catch them doing good. In the organizations I have been with in the past, I noticed a dearth of compliments from colleagues and more so from leaders. After complimenting people for their good work, I noticed that they become more open to helping me out later on and they would even go out of their way to ask if I needed help.
Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson wrote One Minute Manager, where a key lesson in the book is that it takes only a minute to praise someone for doing good work, but it has lasting benefits for the team member’s productivity. Based on experience, it also has lasting benefits for the people manager because it becomes easier to ask for help later on. Positive reinforcement makes people feel good about their work because it tells them they are in the right direction and it motivates them to continue to be in that state.
If possible, look for opportunities where your team can get together without office work in mind. There are online team collaboration platforms where your team can play online, or, if health protocols permit, you can go out as a group where you can just relax and have fun. You can also try looking for outreach programs that your team would be interested in. You can learn so many things about your team by observing them outside of the office environment. This will help you plan and identify incentives they would appreciate.
Incentives are a good way of boosting your team’s morale, and the best thing about incentives is that they can be anything your team wants—free food or parking, new office facilities, and additional bonuses, among others.
The key here is knowing which ones your team will appreciate and value more. I know of a previous colleague who stayed in the organization because of the free medical benefits for her parents. She could have had better pay somewhere else, but she did not want to risk losing those benefits because her parents were already old. The organization knew most of their employees enjoyed this benefit, so they also used it for recruitment purposes.
Understanding your team’s background and how they behave are the two key components in understanding what motivates them, and in identifying essential activities that will boost their morale. Knowing the right balance of motivating them and pushing them will help you manage your team to greater success and improved productivity. And it all begins with how you relate with your team as their leader.
Image credits: Sithamshu Manoj on Unsplash