How To Improve Morale In Your Business
In your typical small business model, the owners or senior executives make all the decisions, and the second tier of key employees and everyone else just goes along with it like good boys and girls. But this is a perverse way of thinking, because although that top tier is making all the decisions, it’s everyone else that has to live with them. Keeping your employees down like that is a great way to have a low morale in your business.
The best way to improve morale in your business is to have everybody in the business – management, key employees, etc., providing feedback from the very outset, so you can really shape win-win solutions. You can even extend that to every member of your organization – reach out by having a company-wide meeting, or a suggestions box, or something like that, so that you can hear all the ideas and points of view.
The top-down, old-fashioned command and control really just doesn’t work. You’ll find that morale will go up dramatically in your business once you ask the people that actually work there what they think, and what they care about, and how they would change things. Ask them what would they do to help improve this business and the way you do things, and how you take care of your customers.
One of the things that employees really want is an open and trusting culture. So if a couple senior executives or just the sole business owners are making all the decisions, what does that tell your employees about how much you really trust them? Aren’t you saying in that instance, is they’re just pawns to move around the chess board, and they exist at your pleasure, and they do what you say and nothing else? What if you open it up? And what if you get ideas and creativity bubbling up from the bottom of your organization? If two heads is better than one, then aren’t 200 heads even better?
I’m not saying they have to make every decision on your behalf, and I’m certainly not saying that you abdicate your stewardship responsibility for your business. What I am saying, though, is open it up, get ideas from the bottom. Morale will go up in your organization and you’d be surprised how many terrific ideas your people are waiting to put on your doorstep.
