Motivating your staff can be quite difficult if you don’t have proper organizational rules. These rules or policies help you to indicate how employees should behave at the workplace and which benefits they can enjoy.
The question is: what kind of rules can you put in place to ensure that you achieve the right balance? What will help you stay content as an employer and make your employees happy as well? This article attempts to answer these questions. Read it to find out how to boost employee morale with fair organizational rules.
Yet first, let’s figure out what employee morale is.
What Is Employee Morale?
Employee morale is the attitude one has towards their organization. It shows how satisfied an employee is with their workplace, how motivated they are to do their job, and how gratified they feel to be a part of the team and the company as a whole.
High employee morale is beneficial for employers and their staff alike:
- When a person enjoys their job and likes the organization they work for, they tend to be much happier with their life overall.
- When the workforce is happy and motivated, it tends to show better performance, which helps the business achieve its goals with greater ease and stay productive.
The way you treat your team makes a big difference to employee morale. Hence, it’s pivotal to have effective organizational rules in place.
Now, let’s find out what makes them so important.
Why Are Good Organizational Rules Matter?
Most employers don’t really comprehend why they need to have organizational rules in place. Unfortunately, the rules adopted in many companies are tilted towards satisfying the employer at the expense of their employees.
Managing staff is important but doing it the right way is even more so. So, here are some benefits of having good organizational rules:
1. Improves employee evaluation
Setting rules should be a win-win for both the company and the employee. While your employee is having fun and resting, you have ample time to evaluate their work. This is not to say that your employees are unreliable. However, it allows you to try someone else in their position and compare performances.
2. Reduces the margin for errors
Without proper rules, your employees will soon begin to make avoidable errors. Some of these mistakes could cost your company thousands of dollars. However, when your employees understand your expectations and have specific norms to follow, they will produce positive results.
3. Boosts team morale
When organizational rules are fair and beneficial for employees, they show that you care about your team’s welfare. They help you to keep your staff members motivated by making them look forward to various benefits, including bonuses and paid vacation. You can bet that well-developed rules will help them to improve their performance and boost morale.
How to Boost Employee Morale with 8 Easy Rules
Boosting team morale is far easier with good organizational rules in place. Here are some tips to help you come with rules that will make your employees happy.
1. Be fair
It is very tricky trying to develop organizational rules. This is because you need to consider if they are fair to the employee as well as the organization. As such, it is important to always find the middle ground.
So when writing your rules, you must ask two questions:
- What does the employee need during their employment period?
- How does this affect the organization?
Your answers to these questions will ensure that you come up with fair policies. You can even ask some of your employees to work with you on developing these policies.
2. Align the policy with company goals
Yes, the rules are meant to make your employees happy. However, if the organization is not achieving its goals, its employees will never attain that happiness. Thus, when developing organizational rules, ensure that they are well aligned with your company’s goals.
This means that you must take into consideration what the employee pay will be like. You must also consider how many other workplace perks each employee may enjoy. Now, check how this affects the work that is to be done. Ensure that your rules don’t compromise your business performance.
3. Set up a reward system
One way to encourage employee productivity is to link your rules with a rewards scheme.
How does this help?
It provides your high-performing employees an incentive to do their jobs better.
While the most common reward is cash, it isn’t the only way to reward your employees. For instance, you can grant employees some extra leave days per year.
What is the point here? Understand the value that your reward system presents to the employee. Not every worker wants some extra cash, some of them just need the extra vacation time. You can add both to your policy and ask such employees to choose which they prefer.
4. Make going on vacation easy for your employees
Leave time management transcends seeking compliance to laid down rules. You need to ensure that your employees are happy with these rules and the vacation as a whole. Some workers are scared to go on vacations because they feel that they’ll have heavier workloads upon their return.
You can deal with such fears in your organizational vacation rules handbook. One way to do this is to include coverage guidelines or systems in your rules. State that available staff will cover up for their duties while they are away.
You also have to be careful when doing this so that workers don’t leave work undone before going on vacation. Part of the rules should state what should be done in this case.
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To explore all the benefits of the tool, subscribe for a free 30-day trial today and see how simple vacation management may become.
5. Implement the raffle system
What if you have employees that want to go on vacation at the same time and you cannot afford that? You need a raffle system in place so that you don’t lose all your employees on vacation at the same time. Sometimes, this will also keep you in check by helping workers decide when they prefer to go on vacation.
This system supports fairness to the employees and the company. There’s a lot more flexibility in the system for workers to enjoy. Also, the company will always have sufficient staff on ground to ensure smooth operations.
6. Promote transparency and consistency
If your employees will remain productive, all employees must have equal rights. This means that your policies must be transparent and consistent across the board. If there are any grey areas, you’d be creating a bad image for your company.
7. Offer special rewards for employees that work on holidays
One way to make your employees happy is to make use of incentives. An example is providing special rewards for employees that are available to work on holidays. Most workers prefer to take such days off. So, if anyone agrees to work during holidays, you should reward their zest commensurately.
Whatever the case is, always ensure that the reward is in line with what the individual needs. it could be money or some days off at another time of the year. Remember that you must be transparent and consistent with these as well.
8. Encourage fun
Working for the company shouldn’t be boring and always serious. A little bit of fun can take your team morale to another level.
Hence, why not make team building games and social events an intrinsic part of your corporate life? This will help your staff members to get to know each other better, become bonded and relieve stress, which is vital if you want the workforce to be satisfied and productive.
