Five instances to increase employee morale

Blog China (blogchina.com)

To solve the problem of how to promote employee morale and create a good corporate atmosphere, techrepublic provides five instances for your reference.

1. Pizza, noodle rings, humor and warning techrepublic Member: Dilbert-Tom was a good manager in my early it career. When a "almost impossible" task is placed in front of the entire team, the manager realizes that it is difficult for the team to use too many standards for development work in a very short time; in his subsequent work, the manager designed a "subsidiary system under the system" to develop specialized programs by Using minimal standards and specifications. Using this system, our team can split a large project into five projects for simultaneous development and complete their independent tasks, which took 20% of the original time. obviously, this is an effective shortcut and can quickly break through the bottleneck of time limit.

It is exactly this thing that I learned how to take a flexible approach to work during the day to complete my work more quickly. At the same time, only a few employees are on standby to complete the repairs and restart work at night (by phone, the project progress can be kept informed at any time ).

I am always grateful to the Manager for his efforts and wisdom. He not only helped our team complete development quickly, but also saved the company more than $0.5 billion in expenses. Unfortunately, after the project is completed, he only receives a 3% salary increase approved by the company. In addition, I have benefited a lot from two other things in this project.

1. one day on Thursday, the manager summoned all the staff involved in system development to hold a morning meeting to thank everyone for their hard work and decision making, you can also apply for one person's vacation time in advance to avoid affecting the overall team's work progress. I think this decision is really good.

2. another thing I remember is that I joined the manager's office with me (this environment seems to be an open space and obviously not suitable for private conversations ). When the office door was closed, he asked me to press the wall and say "I don't want to do this job anymore ". Just as I repeated this sentence, he whispered to open the door. At this moment, a nosy receptionist who claimed that "I'm going to pour coffee just by here" happened to pass through the room (apparently she had been eavesdropping on our conversation at the door ). Afterwards, the manager pointed out to me in a formal conversation that the company could not provide satisfactory salary increases due to some bank problems. He suggested that I look for a job that is more suitable for me. (Two weeks later, I was dismissed by the company. Apparently, the manager knew the news about the layoff, but he didn't tell me directly. However, on the second day of my dismissal, he introduced me to an interview with the boss of another company. I started my new job on the next Monday .) Looking back at this, I don't really want to leave. Even with low salaries, I am happy to be a manager who puts me in the shoes of my employees.

In addition, the manager clearly realized that the interests of all employees depend on the efforts made by everyone. Excellent development and design should be tested by time. As a result, we forecast the possible changes to many standards and specifications in the development work. The manager praised and thanked us for our work. At a meeting of senior management personnel, the company requested some modifications to the program within one week. When some managers expressed doubts about whether we could finish our work on schedule, our manager promised to complete the work within two hours because these possible changes have been addressed in our prediction work. Later, he personally participated in the program modification work, and deliberately moved out time to analyze and record some uncertain problems in the results of parameter changes to ensure that our work was the best. Under the same payment conditions, few companies can achieve great returns. The reason why we can do this is to clearly understand the changes and corrections that it may often face and make preparations in advance. Over-designed single program solution is not only difficult to modify and correct, but also requires 20 or more developers to design a program. Obviously, such development work lacks flexibility and independence, which also results in a waste of time and human resources.
2. techrepublic, a member of the new technology product: after the reorganization of David Ford, there will inevitably be a "low morale" phenomenon. During this period, management should focus on how to motivate employees' morale. Our company took a stable approach to solve this problem, and they bought a communication tool that combines PDA and mobile phone numbers for each employee. In my opinion, this tool not only enables paging (such as corporate calls), but also meets the needs of private mobile phones and facilitates the use of various PDA functions.

It can be seen that new technology products can win people's favor. Understanding and meeting the actual work needs of employees will stimulate employees' morale more effectively.

3. Coffee and conversation techrepublic Member: bvitale strives to create an "Espresso social" atmosphere in our work environment to boost employee morale. Every four or six weeks, everyone in the office building becomes the guests we invite. After three o'clock P.M., everyone gathered together to taste coffee cakes and have a friendly conversation. This activity lasts for about 30 minutes. Due to the lack of space in the office building lobby, we set up activities near the corridor. To show respect for people, there are usually pre-plans and arrangements for each activity, such as celebrations for different festivals, ethnic groups, or achievements. Different types of music can be played from time to time, including classical music, jazz, cocktail party music, Italian music, Spanish music, German music, and Indian music. In this pleasant atmosphere, we often bring infectious things into activities, such as celebrating the traditional mid-autumn festival in China, and holding a baking and photography competition every year.

People can view photos of Party activities through our web pages. It takes only 20 seconds to upload a new photo to the Internet. At the same time, we published a phone number on the web page, so that people can call to ask if there is any new photo update. The browser releases new images every 30 seconds. With this simple system, users who are not familiar with multimedia video conferences can also participate in our activities.

As a member of the company's IT department, after attending the espresso social activity held by the company, I obviously felt the profound impact of the activity, the morale of our entire department is brand new.

After the activity, everyone is thrilled to return to their job and put into work in a better state and mood.

4. Incentive Mechanism (Incentive Mechanism)

Techrepublic Member: Tom Carlisle's effective motivation for people's work is not my first idea. I learned some practical skills from Bruce Botkin in Omaha, Nebraska: buy a toy truck or tractor and a toy racing car first, and then announce the rules to all your employees:

Only one employee will be eligible for this racing car, which is a kind of praise and award for his outstanding performance, unremitting efforts and willingness to help others. The racing car will be placed on the winner's desk until everyone wants to grant it to another person eligible to accept the award. In addition, the winner will share his success experience with all employees when the car is awarded.
Although they are all toys, the significance of granting trucks is not the same as that of granting cars. The truck must be removed from the current owner's desk by the new receiver and placed on his desk. The criteria granted to a person's truck mean that his work has encountered problems or errors, suggesting that he needs to use a truck to inspire his wisdom and talent. Similarly, when a new recipient takes a truck from his predecessor and places it on his desk, he needs to present his mistakes to all the staff and learn from them. It should be noted that the delivery of trucks can only be conducted through self-nomination, in order to motivate employees to admit mistakes and learn lessons.

In summary, by granting racing cars and trucks, employees can gain valuable experience in two aspects: first, granting racing cars a good atmosphere that inspires employees to supervise and learn from each other. Second, the grant of trucks encourages employees to maintain an open-minded and honest attitude and help others learn from their failures.

5. Honor rewards techrepublic Member: prefbid II in the past few years, our company has set up a special "honor" program. Any employee or customer of the company can enter and cast a vote, indicating the person they think is worthy of praise. The two managers are responsible for making fair statistics and then announcing the results to all employees. An outstanding employee will receive a check as a reward. If an employee wins multiple times in a year, he will be eligible for a maximum reward set up by the company each year.

Initially, the honor award system was not valued by the leadership. A company's major reward is often done by providing travel and computers. Until the CIO recommends that managers set up more meaningful reward programs.

The rewards program subsequently implemented by the company is no longer limited to providing travel and computers for only $1000. Some things closely related to people's daily life are introduced into reward mechanisms, such as clock, cooler, hot water bottle, and so on.

In addition, the new rewards program follows an important rule: managers are not qualified for nominations. This is to effectively ensure that the actual honors and rewards do not affect the leader's management level.

The disadvantage of this rewards program is that the cards are too small and must be hand-written for votes.

When colleagues get votes, their joy and satisfaction often shock others. I have also cast many votes, and I am surprised that when people who have always been steady or inactive receive a vote, they can continue this joy for a long time. It is as exciting as watching someone yell "bingo" in a game. I must admit that I was surprised when I learned that the CIO had thrown a vote for me (because I shouldn't have been elected as a supervisor, however, CIOs apparently ignore this rule and vote for me. This means that my work has been recognized and appreciated by him ).

For project managers, implementing such incentives is not suitable. Because most project managers allocate tasks, which limits managers to evaluate their work. Therefore, an important indicator of the project manager's performance and honors depends on whether they can cooperate well with other departments and successfully complete the project tasks.

For example, our company recently acquired a large competitor. My job is to merge and unify IT infrastructure. Although I have repeatedly placated the employees of this company and do not have to worry about dismissal, they cannot actually alleviate their concerns. At the same time, the CEO assigned us some important tasks of merger. This seems to indicate an important turning point. As in all projects, a serious error may affect all work. People deny each other and blame each other for their faults, so as to avoid being regarded as the maker of errors. By putting a lot of pressure, we finally corrected the error and completed the project on time. However, the dissatisfaction and hostility between departments have to be worrying because they think that the other party should take responsibility for errors.
In this case, I think I must do what I can to ease the conflict. After all, it will take at least one year for us to work together on the merger. As a result, I gathered my project management personnel to sit together and each person elected an employee who thought they were eligible to receive an honorary reward, including all the employees who participated in the project work in the merged company, and all non-IT personnel who have helped the project in the acquired company. Then we made statistics on nearly 80 votes.

Through this practice, we soon received satisfactory results. There was a fundamental change in mutual accusations and hostility between employees, and even started to take charge of the team's work. Their mutual cooperation and joint efforts allowed the Team to successfully complete the next task.