[Employee Relations] How is Your Company's Morale?

Employee morale is difficult to quantify, but a key factor in a company’s performance. If morale is low it can result in a range of corporate ills, including employee turnover, poor customer retention and decreased profitability. If morale is high, however, the opposite is true.

But as a business owner often insulated from frontline service personnel, how do you effectively assess employee morale at your company? It’s not that difficult if you’re up to the challenge. We call it the “Tell-Me Tool,” and business owners who use it invariably see an increase in both revenues and overall profitability. It’s challenging, however, because many owners seem to prefer keeping their heads in the sand as opposed to staying in touch with their employees’ morale.

It’s a simple, five-question form we asked employees to complete every Friday afternoon. The answers come directly to the CEO, bypassing supervisors and other managers, so that every employee knows he has a direct contact with me.

Rate your morale for the week on a scale of one to five:

1. Get me out of here
2. Another day, another dollar
3. Satisfied
4. Really nice
5. Couldn’t be better

If you didn’t rate your morale at 5, is there anything I could do to improve it?

Do you have any other suggestions or ideas for the growth or improvement of the company?

This question changed often based on what was going on in the business. It might be something like “we need someone in sales, do you have a suggestion?” to nominations for customer service awards or thoughts on plans for a company picnic.

And we always asked if the employee wanted a response to their comments.

FUNCTIONAL FEEDBACK. The first time I tried this simple tool, I was running an IT staffing service with about 60 employees. The first few weeks, I referenced the forms to a checklist to make sure that all employees were turning in their responses. If not, I called them individually and told them that we really did expect that they spend a couple of minutes filling out the form every single week.

The really scary part of this, from the perspective of an owner or CEO, is that we published the morale rating as a graph every week in our newsletter. In many ways it was an accountability check for me — how was I doing in creating a corporate culture where people wanted to come to work?

We quickly discovered that people are much more likely to write their thoughts down than to express them verbally in a face-to-face meeting, even when we encouraged them to speak up and made ourselves as available as possible. They knew the “tell-me” forms came straight to me and they knew that I would act upon their comments. In fact, that’s why we had to include the fifth question — we had been implementing suggestions without necessarily telling an employee until we got questioned about why we never used their great ideas.

FEEDBACK = GREENBACKS. Ironically, it never became the gripe factory some people expected it to be.

We had a few people ask for raises, a couple of whiners and a few rather outrageous requests, but mostly we got well-thought-out suggestions for improvements, a firm handle on how our people felt about our company, and the opportunity to stop rumors before they went totally out of control.

Over the years, the “tell-me” forms became one of the most valuable instruments we had for maintaining high levels of morale.

That positive energy among our employees created high levels of customer satisfaction that directly resulted in corporate margins that were more than double the industry average.

This year, you can “keep your head in the sand” and pretend everything is fine or you can “take the bull by the horns” and accept responsibility for your top job as an owner or CEO, creating a business environment that makes your company a great place for your employees and thus a profitable enterprise for its stakeholders.

The author is a self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” who has built and sold five businesses in the past 30 years. Wolf and his wife, Pam Jordan Wolf, have created www.netopportunity.biz, a Web site for pest control operators who want to sell, buy or grow their business. You can reach Tom Wolf at 813/960-1810.