20 Group Cohesion Strategies For Developing Teams At Work
In today’s fast-paced, ever-changing business environment, implementing group ...
When employee morale is low, your team will feel it. They’ll suffer from poor performance, lack of motivation, and even a deep dissatisfaction with their job that leads to increased turnover.
When employee morale is high, your team will enjoy stronger bonds, a deeper sense of camaraderie, and a willingness to cooperate that wasn’t there before.
It goes without saying that every manager would prefer high morale over low morale, but how do you go about improving the way your team feels about their job, their coworkers, and your business?
In this article, the workforce-management experts at Sling give you tips to boost employee morale for a better work environment.
Pro Tips To Boost Employee Morale
1) Hire A Diverse Team
Diversity plays an important role in improving employee morale throughout your organization.
Business as a whole is becoming more global every day. Hiring a diverse team gives you access to those markets like never before.
And because they have first-hand access to unique points of view, novel experiences, and broad cultural knowledge, your team will also have the tools necessary to broaden their horizons and push your business into new territory.
Diversity also challenges your employees to explore new ways of thinking and set new goals. This has a hugely positive impact on morale and the way your team works together.
2) Promote Team Cohesion
Cohesion, cooperation, and unity are the heart and soul of all successful teams.
When your business feels like a group of people working toward a common goal rather than individuals just trying to get stuff done, employee morale will skyrocket.
That, in turn, will manifest as an improved work environment, better interpersonal relationships, a higher standard of customer service, and a more enjoyable and productive business culture.
Two surefire ways to bolster team cohesion — and boost employee morale — are to set aside time for fun and to celebrate success.
When you allow your team to socialize, celebrate, and just unwind (with or without you), you make it easier for them to forge meaningful relationships. It’s those relationships that will keep group cohesion and morale high even when the work gets difficult.
For tips on how to promote team cohesion in your business, check out this helpful article from Sling: 10 Group Cohesion Strategies For Developing Teams At Work.
3) Ask For Employee Feedback
Asking for — and listening to — feedback from your team is a powerful tool for boosting employee morale.
When your team sees that you take their suggestions seriously, they’re more likely to feel valued and like they’re a part of a family rather than just someone who shows up, does a job, and leaves.
If eliciting employee feedback is a new practice for your business, try setting up a feedback box.
Employees can submit suggestions, frustrations, positive experiences, or anything else they’d like you to know in a private way that doesn’t require a face-to-face meeting.
Once they’re comfortable with how you react to their feedback, you can establish an open-door policy that allows your employees to talk to you directly about what’s happening on the front lines of your business.
That said, the way you give feedback to your employees is also important. For tips to make giving feedback constructive rather than destructive, take a few minutes to read our article, Employee Feedback: Why It’s Important And How To Give It.
4) Onboard New Hires Successfully
Don’t view onboarding as something you need to get through before you can get back to the “real” work of managing your team. Instead, view it as a way to boost employee morale like never before.
When you put the same importance on your onboarding process as you do on your strategy implementation plan or your project plan, you’ll start to see improvements in the way your employees work — together and in the business as a whole.
That will translate into better morale, better business practices, and more satisfied customers.
For suggestions on perfecting your onboarding process, take a moment to read these helpful resources:
- 15 Onboarding Best Practices To Make New Employees Feel Welcome
- Onboarding Checklist: How To Onboard Your Employees The Right Way
5) Give Employees The Tools They Need
There’s nothing more frustrating — and a bigger hit to employee morale — than not having the resources to do your job effectively and efficiently. So, make sure your employees have those resources!
For example, think about your own job. If you didn’t have X or you had to always do Y before you could do Z, how frustrating would your workday be?
It’s the same for your employees. If they don’t have the simple tools necessary to get their job done in a timely manner or they always have to recreate the wheel before getting to the primary task, their morale will suffer.
If you’re having trouble coming up with ways to implement this suggestion, try asking your team what they need to make their job better.
It could be something as simple as providing more training or something as complicated as updating the technology they use on a daily basis.
Whatever it is, giving your team the right tools for the job will boost their employee morale like few other things.
6) Delineate Responsibilities
To be happy, productive, and enjoy high morale, your team needs a clear set of responsibilities that every employee abides by.
Each team member should know who is responsible for the various tasks that need to be done for your business to run smoothly. Encourage your employees not to overstep their responsibilities in an attempt to make a project go faster.
Similarly, you should also establish a clear hierarchy of responsibility for oversight.
If an employee needs approval from a superior, they should know who that superior is and how to get in touch with them quickly so as not to hold up the workflow.
Once you’ve established clear responsibilities for your team members managers, keep it consistent. Don’t change responsibilities day after day or you risk creating confusion, discontent, and low employee morale.
7) Establish Clear Guidelines And Procedures
Guidelines and standard operating procedures are the foundation on which your team — and your business — operates.
If you haven’t already, establish clear procedures and instructions for everything that has to do with your business, including:
These instructions serve as a framework for your expectations in the day-to-day activity of your business.
Rather than relying on word of mouth or endless team meetings to make these guidelines clear, produce an employee handbook that is available to every employee, all the time.
By doing this, you give your employees a clear path to success because they understand what is expected of them and how they will be evaluated.
The Best Tool To Improve Employee Morale
At its most basic, employee morale depends on communication.
It doesn’t matter if that communication revolves around scheduling, inventory, clocking in and out, ethics, or customer service. The better you communicate with your employees the higher their morale will be.
For truly seamless communication with your employees, you need the right tools.
We developed the Sling app for just that — to streamline communication and improve employee morale in every corner of your business.
Sling is a suite of integrated tools that makes scheduling, tracking labor, finding substitutes, assigning tasks, and building employee morale extremely simple. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
For an all-in-one solution to help you improve your workforce management and implement the ideas mentioned above, incorporate the Sling suite of tools into your workflow.
Features include:
- Powerful and intuitive scheduling
- Comprehensive time-tracking (with geofencing)
- Dynamic reporting
- Time-saving payroll processing
- Customizable communication (e.g., location-specific or team-wide)
- Effective budgeting
- Productive labor-cost optimization
- Helpful overtime control
- And much more…
Add to that Sling’s onboard artificial intelligence and you’ve got an extremely beneficial and flexible set of tools that will help you manage your team, increase morale, and improve the way they work.
For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit GetSling.com today.
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This content is for informational purposes and is not intended as legal, tax, HR, or any other professional advice. Please contact an attorney or other professional for specific advice.
