Employee morale can significantly impact the level of productivity and success that a business sees. This can play an even bigger role for smaller businesses operating with a particularly limited staff because low morale from one team member can have a more exaggerated effect. A NexGen Payroll blog post explored the task of improving employee morale, noting that while all employers and team members will have good and bad days, bad days should not outnumber the good. In these scenarios, business decision makers need to step in and provide solutions to boost employee spirits, the company’s bottom line and overall productivity.
“It’s easy to pretend the negativity doesn’t exist, but it is your job as a leader to understand where it comes from and what is feeding into bad attitudes at your office,” the article stated. “While almost anything that you do as a boss could essentially make someone on your staff mad, the fact is, businesses that have the biggest problems with employee morale are the ones that only focus on the business and the bottom line and not on the fact that the employees are an integral cog in the wheel of the business.”
Employee Morale Issues
According to the source, many business decision makers fall into the trap of blaming any employee morale problems on the state of the economy. However, research has shown that morale can still be positive even in these circumstances. In order to get to the root of the problem, company leaders can evaluate both the human resources function for the business and the technological resources being implemented since adopting new or advanced communications solutions can sometimes improve employee morale.
Communications and Employee Morale
Writing in an article which recently appeared on Business 2 Community, communications development expert Enzo Signore shared insight from more than 25 CIOs and top IT decision makers about business collaboration and mobility. In particular, in order for a collaboration strategy to work, companies need to establish trust among all involved parties. Without first establishing trust, no effective collaboration can occur. Since a business cannot execute without sufficient collaboration, meaning that the business will not stay in business for much longer if involved parties do no trust each other.
“When it comes to trust nothing beats a face to face dialogue,” Signore wrote. “But in a globally connected world, with companies leveraging talent and labor rates in different countries while serving customers around the world, trust needs to be cultivated on a day to day basis. This requires video-enabled collaboration solutions to effectively span time zones and cultural differences. And it requires that these solutions run on the devices now used by everyone – PCs and mobile devices.”
Signore also shared the experience of one executive in particular, who recently decided to allow the company’s marketing team to telecommute. After rolling out mobile voice and video solutions, the exec indicated that both employee productivity and morale significantly improved.
AccessDirect provides ideal collaboration solutions such as virtual phone that can help facilitate the improvement of workplace morale. With a virtual PBX phone system, lines can be added to existing mobile devices and the phone service is completely VoIP compatible. This enables employees to make use of cost-efficient collaboration solutions such as web-based conferencing using their mobile devices from any location.
You can read more about how employee morale impacts small businesses in a previous post in our resources section.
