(note - that’s morale not moral)
I’ve been having a conversation with some friends of mine about morale. We all used to work at the same place, and we still have friends there, and we’ve noticed a certain change in the atmosphere recently.
For the first time *any* of us can remember morale is low across all three major offices (US, UK and Australia). Now these things tend to go in cycles, sometimes morale is good, sometimes it’s bad. But we’ve never seen it bad across the whole company.
Which got us to thinking about how does one affect morale?
I argued that
“Morale is a funny thing, in that it’s much more dependent on people than you’d think. Remember how morale in HQ improved when Fuzz and I got back? It wasn’t that we were special, but we were upbeat and cheerful, and that infected others.
Sadly it’s that simple. One or two people who are determined to be cheerful and optimistic (or even just make a lot of stupid jokes) can improve the morale of an office 100% more than any stupid “come to work in your pyjamas” day or “team bonding event”
I’d be willing to bet you that if you and Dean were back in the NA office morale there would improve *without anything else changing*. “
As a Communications person, who has worked in Internal Comms with HR people I’ve been responsible for my fair share of morale improving stunts. But every time I’ve organised a company wide treasure-hunt, or bowling day, I’ve tried to make sure the people who are naturally upbeat and optimistic get put in teams where they outnumber the pessimists. And slowly you can start to turn the morale around.
Seriously - want to improve morale in *your* office? Let people who are friends sit together, and encourage them to make jokes. They’ll infect all the people around them with the feeling that coming to work is fun. That’s all you need to do.
The problem with that approach of course is that in general, management seeing people talking and laughing as being deleterious to productivity. In many, many workplaces there’s still the cultural idea that work shouldn’t be fun.
Naturally, I don’t agree with that point of view I’ve already argued I think the ability to have fun at work is fundamental to the process of being innovative
If you like the people you work with, if you have fun at work, your morale will be high, and that of the people around you will be high, even if your office has never had a “come to work dressed as your favourite superhero” day
