The mystery of morale

(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

The Alchemy of Innovation

One of the people I work with used to work for the Government in the “Commercial Ready Grant” program, assessing new high-technology companies. One of her tasks was assessing, and developing frameworks for “innovation centres” like the Australian Technology Park. The idea behind these parks is that small, high-tech businesses benefit from being co-located. Which is, essentially, the argument that gets made about why there are so many innovative start-ups in Silicon Valley.

But there’s obviously more to it than that - there are plenty of non-innovative start-ups in Silicon Valley as well, and there are innovative start-ups that happen outside of these hot-spots.

It seems pretty self-evident that there has to be something about the people who work at the company as well; and there has to be something about the company culture.

It’s the way in which all these factors combine that seems to encourage innovation.

After thinking about it I’ve come up with what I think are the 4 key factors, and I’m interested in feedback…

1) Location - location is important. The innovator has to be in an area where they can attract like-minded people to come and work for them, and there’s ample opportunity for the cross-fertilisation of ideas. The people who work for the company have to be able to hang out with other innovative people who don’t work for the same company. Often all you need for a radical new solution to a problem is just a completely different way of looking at the problem.

2) Company culture - It’s not enough to say “we’re an innovative company”, the culture has to encourage it. That goes beyond the “we’re not afraid to try things and fail” mantra that most companies think is the bedrock of innovation. You’ve got to be prepared to look stupid, or silly. I think there’s a good reason why the really innovative places always look like they’d be really fun places to work - it’s because you can’t really come up with a left field idea if you’re not prepared to do some daft things. I think most people are more afraid of looking silly than they are of failing.

3) The people - Culture is all about people. So the people working for the company have to be more than good team members - they have to be friends, they have to trust one another, they have to enjoy spending time together. No one is going to suggest a disruption to the status quo unless they know the people they work with are going to support them.

4) Engineers - This is the factor where I’m going out on a limb a bit. I think any truly innovative company has to have what I’d term an “engineering mindset” This doesn’t mean all the people working there have to *be* engineers, they just have to think like them for two key reasons

• Engineers believe that *all* problems can be solved, and should be solved.
• Engineers know that no solution is absolute. The world changes - the solution that worked best last year - has probably been superseded.

It’s this approach to the world that drives invention, and innovation.