10 ways to boost morale and productivity

It’s hard to have happy, productive staff in a climate when the bad news just keeps on rolling. The good news is, there are cheap and easy ways to increase productivity (and smiles) in the workplace.

Lesson 1: Get out and walk the floor

Deloitte human capital partner NSW, Nicola Wakefield, says job cuts are on the mind of most of her clients. “They have either done it, are about to do it, or thinking about it,” she says.

When these cuts are on the radar, many managers actively avoid face-to-face time with staff, casual conversations, private or group meetings. “They [managers] stop walking the floors,” she says. “They are scared they will have to sack people.”

Instead of working with all staff to get through this tough time, some managers choose to shut down. A communication breakdown occurs, ruining opportunities to work out of the downturn. “Staff absolutely want to talk about what is going on in the market,” she says. Open, honest communication is crucial.

Lesson 2: Morale boosting doesn’t have to cost the earth

Having happy workers is something that Carolyn Creswell takes extremely seriously. The founder of Carman’s Fine Foods, Creswell has several homegrown strategies for boosting morale that include employing a part-time “office nanny” whose role includes arranging coffees, waters and take-away lunches for staff, as well as filing and answering calls while staff take a lunch break.

Each day, at the end of lunch, the 14 head office staff get together and take a daily current affairs quiz published in a daily newspaper. “We all get out of our work headspace for a few minutes and laugh our heads off,” says Creswell, who believes these initiatives boost productivity. “We get a lot done with a highly motivated group of people,” she says.

Lesson 3: Ask and you shall know

Every Friday, Creswell’s company pays for a lunch, delivered to a meeting room from a local restaurant. At the lunch, among other business, each member of the 14 staff must answer two questions:

– How many emails are there in your in-box?
– One a scale of one to 10, how stressed are you?

These two pieces of information are extremely useful. Staff can stay connected to each other, recognise other people’s needs, help out overloaded colleagues, workloads can be adjusted, and Creswell can monitor how well her team is coping and how well each individual copes with stress and organising themselves.

Deloitte’s Wakefield recommends taking these open conversations a step further, to asking all staff a simple but critical question: In this market situation, what can we do?

Lesson 4: It’s not about you

Organisational psychologist Christopher Shen warns that in tough times leaders can become “disproportionally focused on their own needs, wants and disinclinations”. When work teams are not communicating openly, trust and confidence in colleagues dissipates, and morale plummets.

In this economy, companies are fighting for survival, reducing costs and trying to develop better operating models.

A critical ingredient in the innovation process is knowledge sharing. If staff are not collaborating across the organisation to come up with ways to solve problems and improve the business, how can a business grow?

Lesson 5: Timing is everything

There is actually a worse morale killer than retrenchments. It is sacking a significant chunk of the workforce and announcing a pay rise for the CEO in the same week. But this obvious blunder keeps happening.

On 25 March, staff at a 3M plant in France were so angry about paltry severance packages for 110 of the plant’s 253 workers, and the chairman George Buckley’s 21% payrise to $US12 million, that they held 3M executive Luc Roussele hostage for two days.

3M, known for its Post-It notes among other innovations, may have won dozens of employer of choice awards “for investing in our people” in the past, but tough times reveal the true values of the business. Clearly it is one thing to have happy, productive staff during boom times, it is another to be an employer of choice in tough economic times.

Lesson 6: Treat retrenched workers with the utmost respect

It’s a sign of the times that NEC Australia is funding “unhappy hour” farewell drinks in several departments over the coming weeks as 153 staff leave the company.

When companies don’t treat retrenched staff well, there are long-term risks beyond laziness and bogus sick days. The bad reputation lingers, long after the markets have recovered. “We will come out of this recession,” says Wakefield. “And those that do it [retrenchment] well will be remembered.”

Google has announced 200 redundancies in sales and marketing departments. Staff will be offered outplacement and severance packages, as well as the opportunity to apply for other jobs in the $US109 billion company. The company is still hiring, looking at 360 staff positions (just not sales and marketing).

It is unlikely Google staff will take their managers hostage over the decision. Unlike the 3M CEO remuneration, company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have taken home annual salaries of $1 since 2005 (their primary compensation is through their ownership stakes) with no stock options or bonuses.