A demotivated team or team members can have a negative impact on service delivery and productivity. Team members who are dissatisfied in their role tend to think less creatively and may show a lack of care for their work.
As a manager, it’s in your interest to address negative feelings that impact staff morale. Low moral may have a negative affect on how your staff carry out their work. This doesn’t mean you need to become a therapist or that you should have all the answers to resolve the issues responsible for the negative feelings. However, it does mean you should be aware of the techniques and strategies available to you to address low morale on an individual and team basis.
Common causes of low job satisfaction
Workplace environment
Setting up and maintaining a healthy workplace environment is central to establishing the circumstances for employee job satisfaction. This covers everything from the way you communicate with and support staff to how you appreciate and reward positive behaviours and work outcomes.
Decision making
How you communicate with your staff will determine the extent to which they feel engaged with the work they do. Clear instructions and boundaries should be established while also encouraging staff contribution and consultation in major decisions affecting their job. By engaging staff in decision making you benefit from their initiative, experience and creativity. You also nurture a sense of being a part of the decision making process. Low job satisfaction may result from a sense of powerlessness. By bringing staff in to the decision making process you can start to address this problem.
Relationships
Communication is about building professional relationships with your team and between team members. You could focus on this during team meetings, team building exercises, coffee and lunch breaks, seminars and training days. This is a time to communicate your recognition and respect for each person’s role and achievements within the organisation and set the boundaries of their relationship with you. You need to establish an open door policy if anyone is experiencing difficulties while also maintaining respect for your role as the boss.
Communication is also about listening and being receptive to the dynamic between staff members. If you identify conflict within the team you need to address this. This means you need to identify what is causing the conflict or bullying and take measures to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Emotional intelligence would be useful here.
Job to person fit
However hard you work to recruit the right person to the right job, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. This might happen if someone is overqualified for the role or has fallen in to a career choice out of circumstance rather than design. For instance, high unemployment or a high number of graduates from university. This may encourage applications for vacancies from people with ambitions greater than a particular vacancy can offer. A person’s life choices may dictate their career path and hence their employment record. However, the potential of such an employee could be undervalued as a result, leading to low job satisfaction.
A manager’s role is to exploit the full potential of an employee to the benefit of the business. To do this you need to be able to identify a person’s potential.
Techniques
Encourage ideas and initiative in carrying out a job role. Try picking up cues to help understand what motivates staff and review performance to evaluate what they are capable of.
Appraisals
Appraisals are a great tool to encourage staff to explain what their needs are and their career ambitions within the company. It can also be used to recognise and reward staff for positive contributions.
An appraisal not only allows you to monitor and direct work targets and outcomes, but can allow you to explore employee ambitions and understand what motivates them. Even discussing ambition and motivation communicates to your employees that you are interested in them.
An appraisal enables you to establish a career path going forward to benefit the business and employee needs. This might include training for new skills or delegation of new responsibilities. If an employee has the capability, time and ambition to take on a new responsibility, the impact on job satisfaction should be self evident.
Learning style
Most people associate learning style with education. However a learning style refers to how a person processes information and the conditions that optimise their thinking process. So learning styles are applicable to all aspects of life. A Kinaesthetic learner for instance would likely be dissatisfied with a role that requires them to sit at a desk all day. Kinaesthetic learners like to interact with their environment and often prefer an element of physical activity in their work. If this is absent they may slow down mentally, get bored more easily and become less productive.
Similarly, visual and auditory learners will suit certain kinds of work better than others. This is the kind of information about a person that can be missed from reading their CV or from how they perform at interview. It doesn’t always mean they can’t excel in any given role, just that the way in which they carry out that role will likely be more successful if it suits their learning style.
Work-life balance
We all have private lives. If the cause of poor morale and low job satisfaction lies outside of the workplace it could be that your team member needs to address their work-life balance. It’s unlikely your employee will be able to prevent concerns, related to non-work scenarios, from affecting their performance at work, or their attitude to the job.
If ignored, a poor work life balance will lead to mental health issues. Working with the employee to establish a work life balance that suits them and you will lead to a happier, more productive and satisfied member of staff.
If working excessive hours at work is the result of a poor work-life balance it can be overlooked by some managers. However, this can also lead to serious mental health issues such as burnout. Ignoring burnout may reduce productivity, service standards and result in absenteeism.
And finally…
While a number of common causes of low job satisfaction are covered here, the list is not comprehensive. Low pay or lack of promotional opportunities, impending redundancies or major changes within the business may all have a negative impact on staff morale. There will be some causes that are out of your control.
However, the tools and techniques to address low staff morale, even in these circumstances, still apply. Managing a team requires people skills and good communication. If done well you could nurture a committed, productive, cooperative and happy workplace. Such a workplace would lead to more successful business outcomes, lower staff turnover and the reputation for good management skills in demand across industry.