4 Best Tools to Inspire and Elevate Workplace Morale

Workplace morale is an essential metric to measure a company’s success. It touches upon the facets of employee engagement and experience, workplace environment, and organizational culture. As such, this metric is closely tied to employee productivity and retention, directly impacting a business’s bottom line.

However, changing employee demands, hybrid work models, and an unstable economy have made it difficult to enhance employee morale. Moreover, most employees are feeling disconnected from their work. So, how can employers prioritize employee morale and promote their overall well-being to run a successful business?

How can you weather the storm and inspire your employees to improve workplace morale? By leaning on innovative and collaborative tools. Keep reading this article for more information.

Importance of Workplace Morale and Tools You Can Employ to Boost It

Workplace morale refers to an employee’s physiological relationship with their work and organization. This relationship keeps evolving with time and is heavily influenced by a company’s environment and resultant experiences.

Even though it’s an intangible concept, workplace morale is a powerful factor in determining your business’s success or failure.

For instance, your team could consist of some of the best minds in the industry. Yet it won’t benefit your business if the majority of your team is there to: 

• collect paychecks, 
• regularly monitor the clock to count down the hours, 
• continuously dream of the weekend.

A business can’t survive, let alone thrive if its employees are:

• dissatisfied with their work, 
• feel disconnected from the environment, 
• don’t have faith in the leadership or the business model,
• dread coming in or logging in to work the next day. 

Dissatisfied workers won’t just stagnate your business’s growth but also cost you money. In fact, unmotivated and disengaged employees cost the global economy $7.8 trillion or 11% of the world’s GDP. 

In contrast, engaged and satisfied employees: 

• positively impact consumer satisfaction, 
• increase sales and profitability, 
• improve organizational participation. 

Enhanced participation and productivity also reduce employee turnover. This results in a resilient workforce that’s ready to shoulder unforeseen circumstances.

According to statics, over half of the global workforce is stressed out and only 21% are actively engaged. So what should employers do?

Steps Employers Can Take to Boost Employee Morale

Before we get to the steps you can take to boost workplace morale, it’s vital to understand the factors that affect it. The key factors affecting workplace morale are:

• Team leaders: leaders who are invested in their team’s growth and improvement often provide constructive feedback and empower them to give their 100%. 

On the other hand, unmotivated leaders contribute to a disengaged work environment. This leads to disvalued and demotivated employees.

• Culture: effective communication and collaboration make your employees feel ‘heard,’ understood, and valued.
• Recognition and appreciation: employees who are recognized and awarded for their contribution to the company’s success are motivated to work harder. This leads to higher productivity.
• Work-life balance: if your employees are stressed and don’t have a healthy work-life balance, they’ll soon pay a visit to burnout land.
• Professional growth and development: if someone from your team feels stuck in their role and doesn’t receive any opportunities for growth and development, they’ll begin disliking their work. Soon they’ll begin disliking the entire organization.

Though low workplace morale is a costly issue, you can’t increase it by offering your employees monetary incentives. At least, not in the long run. That said, you can take some initiative to improve employee engagement, experience, and job satisfaction, such as: 

• Collect employee feedback to understand what makes them tick: what’s better than going directly to the source to figure out how your employees feel about their work, supervisors, and your company? Collect anonymous employee feedback and go through the honest answers to determine your plan of action. 
• Proactively improve your company’s culture: drinks after work on Friday is an excellent idea to build camaraderie among your team. But it’s not enough. Additionally, you miss out on interacting with employees who skip the free drinks and head their way. 

However, you can promote a positive, kind culture where everyone is treated the same. This will have a lasting, positive impact on your employee’s psyche.

• Appreciate your employees: don’t categorize wins as small or big. Wins are wins. They should be celebrated as such. You don’t have to go all out every time. But appreciating your employees and acknowledging their hard work and dedication is paramount. 

For instance, you can give Max a shout-out for closing his first client. Or Jeannine for perfecting the product roadmap.

• Promote work-life balance: a dissatisfied, demotivated, or burnout employee is of no use to the company. So ensure that your employees don’t reach these stages. Or rather communicate with you before reaching these stages.

Encourage your employees to work hard but also find time to indulge their family, friends, and hobby.

• Encourage your employees’ professional growth: being invested in your employee’s growth and development is non-negotiable. Encourage them to think outside the box. Yet ascertain that they know your door is open should they need your input. 

Maintain open channels of communication with your employees and provide them with constructive criticism. This will work wonders for your business’s goals and revenue. You should also motivate them to upskill themselves.

These are just the five most basic steps every company must take to improve employee morale. Although these will instill team spirit and ensure your employees have a voice, they will take some time to bear fruit. 

So what can you do to begin inspiring and elevating workplace morale immediately? Lean on collaborative tools.

4 Tools Businesses Can Rely on to Improve Employee Morale

The management, leadership, and HRs play an important role in boosting workplace morale. But it’s difficult for them to proactively cover all employees’ needs while improving the work environment, culture, and employee engagement.

This is where intuitive tools that support employee collaboration and well-being come in. These tools can be easily integrated into large workplaces to boost teamwork and morale. So without further ado, here’s a list of the four best tools to help you put your employees first.

#1 Perkbox

Recognition at the workplace is important to at least 37% of employees. So it’s important to build a culture of recognition wherein all employees are treated equally. Appreciating their efforts and contribution to the business goes a long way in boosting employee morale.  

But keeping track of achievements, outstanding performance, and milestones isn’t simple. Especially in a large organization. Enter Perkbox.

Perkbox is a global rewards and recognition platform that aids you in cultivating a positive team culture. It lets you appreciate your employees no matter where they are through employee rewards, discounts, benefits, and company-wide recognition. 

The solution is trusted by over 4,000 businesses across 140 countries because it:

• Helps recognize employees via Celebration hub: this enables employees to recognize each other personally. It also makes it easier for managers and team leaders to reward deserving candidates. 
• Offers a Perks hub: you can save time and resources by managing all benefits and rewards from a single hub. Moreover, you can offer your employees access to over 4,000 deals and discounts worldwide.

The rewards can be based on multiple categories, including food and drink, tech and electronics, home and garden, health and beauty, entertainment, fashion, and learning. 

You even have the chance to offer your employees a monthly allowance of Flexi points to pay for Flexi Perks.

• Supports your employees’ well-being: this ad-free feature makes it easier for you to care for your employees’ physical and mental well-being. Dedicated resources, such as Sanctuary, House of Wellbeing, and My Online Therapy will support them. 

Employees can access quality content anytime, anywhere, from any device—phones, laptops, tablets, and smartwatches. They can choose from workout videos, guided meditations, and soothing sleep stories to focus on their health.

• Promotes communication through the Culture hub: you can enhance internal communication to eliminate the distillation of information. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page regardless of their location and time zone. 

Moreover, you can share company news, updates, changes in company policies, exciting information, and more via visual cards.

Perkbox can be accessed via its user-friendly mobile app too.

#2 Agendrix

What do you do when you’ve got a scattered team and need to manage and keep track of your employees’ schedules online? You use Agendrix.

This solution is trusted by over 12,000 businesses and used by nearly 160,000 individuals in America and Europe. Agendrix’s online work schedule maker allows you to create work schedules within minutes instead of hours. This tool’s salient features include the following:

• Send the created work schedules to your team instantly.
• With enhanced visibility, you can quickly manage your employees’ time off and fill empty shifts.
• Push notifications to remind your employees of their upcoming shifts. They’ll also receive alerts and notifications if there are any changes to their work schedule.
• With seen confirmations, you can ascertain that your employees are aware of all updates.
• Ensures that schedules are always in sync.
• Makes it easier for your employees to swap schedules with their colleagues.
• You can turn your employees’ iPad, Android tablets, and computers into clocking devices. You just need the Agendrix app and customized PINs.
• Integrate payroll system integrations for painless payroll management.
• Use time banks to track overtime, leaves, and time off.
• You can create surveys, recognize your employees, and onboard new employees without breaking a sweat.

If you’re unsure about Agendrix, just take it for a test drive for up to 21 days. You won’t have to share your credit card information.

#3 Mo

Mo is an employee engagement and reward and recognition platform. It assists teams in communicating better and celebrating their wins—big and small—more frequently. This tool’s salient features include:

• Mo offers teams ‘Boosts’ to allow them to collaborate and communicate better.
• This solution fosters connection among teams so that they can comfortably share their achievements, and life updates, or just keep in touch. Employees can react to the shared moments to become a part of them.
• Recognize and reward hard-working employees with their gift of choice. The recipient gets to choose among various reward options from top brands. While the sender can control the spending limit. This also reduces admin workload.
• Deep insights allow leaders to identify team activity, trends, and current team culture.

Mo can be easily integrated within your existing systems and solutions, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Intranet.

#4 Kudos

Kudos is a great tool that allows companies to improve their employee engagement, retention, and rewards strategies. This tool is gaining popularity among employers because:

• It supports peer-to-peer recognition based on a company’s values, culture, and performance.
• It hosts an endless rewards selection, including merchandise, gift cards, travel, and other experiences, to help you recognize and reward your employees at all levels.
• Kudos People Analytics provides actionable insights into team members’ performance, company culture, and employee experience.
• It tracks employee morale. This allows HRs to build award programs reflective of their company’s culture to appreciate enterprising individuals.
• Kudos Milestones let you celebrate vital moments to build deeper connections with your employees.
• Through Kudos, you can seamlessly monitor your employee’s health and their perception of the company. It also offers anonymous, monthly Sentiment Surveys. This survey will allow you to better understand your employee’s psyche. So that you can tweak your culture and environment accordingly.
• You can integrate Kudos with your existing workflows. It promotes seamless incorporation with Slack, Outlook, and Teams so that you or your team don’t spend any time or resources learning a new platform.

You can even contact Kudos recognition and culture experts to use this solution effectively. This will aid you in building a comprehensive recognition model to improve workplace morale.

Conclusion

Elevating employee morale is paramount for businesses to succeed in the current business landscape. Improving employee engagement and experience and transforming the company environment and culture is easier said than done.

However, recognizing the factors essential for boosting morale and following some simple steps can mean the difference between an employee doing their job and an employee succeeding at their role. For immediate results, you can turn to the listed innovative tools.