5 Tips for Boosting Employee Morale in the New Year

© All-American Pest Control

Editor’s note: Erin Richardson is the first female president, CEO and owner of third-generation business All-American Pest Control. Since buying the business in 2012, Richardson has implemented a four-day workweek and a variety of strategic bets that fueled the company's growth and reputation. She currently serves on NPMA’s Board of Directors, TPCA’s Board of Directors, the Workforce Development Steering Committee and NPMA’s Diversity Council. She founded the Tennessee Chapter of Professional Women in Pest Control, and she recently chaired NPMA’s Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Task Force. She has grown her family business to a PCT Top 100 firm, ranking #77 on this year’s list. In the following feature, Richardson shares tips for boosting employee morale based on her experience running All-American Pest Control.

We’re in the business of helping people—whether a customer or someone on our own team—and happy customers start with happy employees. 

Understanding that workplace culture can directly affect customer satisfaction and, ultimately, your bottom line, how can you make sure to boost your team’s morale as you head into 2023? Below are some of the strategies and tools we have developed over my 18+ years of leadership at All-American Pest Control to boost morale, improve team retention and inspire leadership development.

Build a Rhythm for Communication
Team members value clear and ongoing communication regarding their job performance, their growth, company goals and company progress. This can be accomplished through regular check-ins, reporting and company updates. What we have found to be even more valuable to the company's future health and our team's leadership development is a rhythm of communication that goes both ways. 

Weekly, we ask each team member to share what’s working, what’s not and what our customers are saying. We take these comments and feedback and share them with the appropriate team or department to discuss and make meaningful changes to our systems and processes. As a leader going into 2023, it is not enough to listen to your team and show that you care; nurturing an environment where you gather feedback that can only be found in front-line experiences and interactions is essential.

By training teams to work together through a structured, nurtured rhythm of communication, you build a sense of pride and ownership that empowers team members to be an integral part of the company's future progress.

Develop a System for Leveling Up and Succession PlanningOur team has shared feedback that the mentorship they receive from peers and leaders remains helpful to their continued growth, both personally and professionally. 

A mentorship program encourages not only growth for the mentee but also for the mentor—it’s a win-win. It was a pivotal point for me in my business leadership when I realized that to continue to grow fast, we would be outnumbered by new team members from then on. That realization helped us to accept that we had to become an exceptional training company. Years later, I realized that as we continued to grow, we would be bottlenecked by a lack of quality leadership if we didn’t fine-tune how we developed servant leaders within our organization.

Today, we have created an environment where all leaders are hungry to get better at the hard and soft skills of leadership. Our teams learn how to coach well, build teams, conduct stay interviews, give sincere feedback, believe in their people while helping them succeed, manage their time and create leveling-up and succession plans.

Monthly, each leader with direct reports presents the specific skills and experiences they are nurturing with their team members. They are also responsible for naming and mentoring 2-3 team members who will be prepared to take their current role when it comes time for the leader to be promoted.

Give Back
Employees appreciate a workplace that cares. Not just for its business and employees but for the community. When job searching, company values are more commonly sought out and considered by potential employees.

We value our community and know we wouldn’t be where we are without our neighbors and customers. At All-American Pest Control, we actively give back throughout the year. Recently we ran a donation drive with our employees for Operation Stand Down Tennessee and spent a morning volunteering with Wreaths Across America ahead of the holidays. 

We also host an annual Hometown Hero Award, encouraging our community to nominate their local heroes for a chance to receive free services from us for the year. It’s something the team consistently looks forward to and it lets us share our love and talent with those who most deserve it!