Everyday Practices to Boost Employee Morale as a Team Manager

As a team manager, you’ve no doubt labored over ways to boost the morale of your team. While there may be a lot of different strategies you can use to accomplish this goal, it can be a little tricky to know where to start. Having some guidance around the process can make it far easier to instill in your team with a newfound sense of motivation and drive.

Here are some everyday practices to boost employee morale as a team manager.

Engage in Inclusivity Efforts

One key factor in keeping a team’s morale high is ensuring that everyone feels welcome and included. If some team members feel left out, judged, or isolated, it will take a heavy and dramatic toll on the atmosphere in the office and levels of motivation.

To ensure that your team never experiences this type of dip in morale, it’s vital to engage in efforts and practices that display your team’s inclusive nature. This can include practices such as utilizing inclusive language, celebrating various cultural holidays, and encouraging team members from marginalized groups to share their experiences.

By engaging in these tactics, you’ll be able to make every team member feel like they're a part of the whole and, as a result, more motivated to work with the team to accomplish lofty goals.

Plan Team-Building Events

Whether it’s a nature retreat, a corporate event, or a pizza party in the office, having team-building events can have a significant impact on your team’s morale. While people can develop strong bonds during the regular work schedule, team-building events and activities offer the chance for employees to develop substantial friendships and feelings of connection.

By cultivating stronger bonds in your team, your team members will be more motivated to show up for their colleagues and produce high-quality work. As such, crafting spaces for your team to forge deeper bonds with each other can have a dramatically positive impact on morale and feelings of job satisfaction in your office.

Encourage Work/Life Balance

When employees feel burnt out from work, their work life can become a facet of their life that they associate with stress and negative emotions. As a result, employees will likely feel a marked drop in their sense of motivation and morale.

To guarantee that this doesn’t happen, it can be incredibly significant if you as a team manager encourage work/life balance in your team’s lives. This can be as simple as being flexible with them taking time off early once in a while for family activities or implementing remote options for certain tasks.

Though these gestures may seem small in nature, allowing your team members to live fulfilling lives outside of work will actually make them better employees in several ways. Most importantly, they’ll feel more driven to work diligently at work while also feeling happier as a part of your team.

Prioritize Communication with Your Team

When it comes to workplaces with low levels of morale among employees, oftentimes the root cause is poor communication between management and employees. An insufficient amount of meaningful communication of this nature will cause your team members to feel unheard, uncertain, and undervalued.

To decrease the chances of your employees feeling this way, prioritizing communication can go a long way. Examples of ways to communicate effectively with your team include explaining the reasons behind upper management decisions, encouraging team members to come with you with any thoughts or concerns without the fear of consequences, and making an effort to take employee suggestions into account.

The more normalized deep communication becomes in your team, the more morale will be boosted and employees will feel comfortable and valued.

Create Paths for Employee Advancement

One aspect of work-life that can have a significant impact on your team member’s levels of motivation is their room to grow professionally. If employees don’t feel like there are any paths for them to advance in their company, it will take a significant toll on their levels of morale and job satisfaction.

To remedy this, it’s imperative to provide employees with paths to advance their professional skills and become more valuable employees that have the chance to be promoted. Growing and evolving are natural parts of human development, and giving employees a space to do so professionally will make them feel more content and motivated to contribute high-quality work.

Boosting Employee Morale Should Be a Priority

Levels of employee morale have the power to affect many different facets of work life. From levels of efficiency to levels of productivity, a failure to invest in initiatives that boost employee morale can have a disastrous impact on your company.

Thankfully, there are some simple everyday practices that you can engage in to boost your team’s motivation and have them reach their full potential. By engaging in these key practices, you can transform the atmosphere in your workplace and help your company find success.