Subject: Motivating staff in hard times

Here's a few drawn from my own good/bad experience..!

Improving morale...

- exhausted everyone's contributions through constant brain storming and consultation

- for every idea put forward/into a suggestion box, responded to say either (i) why we can (ii) why we can't or (iii) why we'll do it later.

Reducing morale...

- work collaboratively and consult extensively until it comes to making a decision when you ignore everyone's input - or worse, pull an initiative which everyone's been working on to overcome the short-term challenges

- operated in a culture dominated by politics or bullish behaviour rather than objective justification/ clear rationale.

Non-financial rewards...

- huge amounts of informal learning and development opportunities

Good communication

- I once worked in an organisation where the whole organisation had a daily ten-minute catch-up with the Chief Executive. It's a miracle how they managed it but the staff knew about everything first-hand and the commitment to top-level thinking was huge.

I worked somewhere once that had a suggestions email box. I sent ideas a couple of times and never got a reply. It was all very well to have set something up but good ideas and bad should at least have been acknowledged and discussed. Makes morale worse not better if managed poorly.

Thanks for your comments HRBird and MelBelle. Interesting (but not surprising) that good communication is top of the list as influencing morale. So often communication drops off the to-do list when things get tough but this shows how important it is.

What other good practice should we add to our list of ways to motivate staff?

I am feeling frustrated with my organisation at the moment. There are lots of decisions being made by senior management which directly affect me and my team. On the surface the culture is all about 'consultation' but in reality it much more one way. We get told things through formal management communication methods rather than sitting down together. I don't do my job like that and neither should they.

As an example, we were told ages ago on the staff intranet that annual increments were frozen for two years but the discussion about how else to recognise our hard work has only just started and it was staff who asked senior managers for this. Who is responsible for our morale? Everyone knows that morale is linked to performance. 

There's this thing that senior managers do where important communications are cascaded to all managers at a particular time, strictly embargoed until the time is right for it to be released to all staff at the same time. This is awful. I suppose it's to stop whispers but instead it creates a them and us division and a lot of unneccessary uncertainty. It only undermines my confidence in the ability of senior managers.

Stokebloke, I feel really sorry for you and for your managers who are struggling in these uncertian times.  What you seem to be describing is a climate of mistrust and what you need is outstanding leaders who are focussed on people and not process.  The Work Foundation undertook reserach recently into outstanding leadership behaviours

"The report reveals three organising principles of outstanding leaders:

• they think and act systemically, seeing the whole picture rather than compartmentalising

• they see people as the sole route to performance and are deeply people and relationship centred rather than just people oriented

• they are self-confident without being arrogant; they are aware of their strengths and their position of influence, yet use these for the benefit of their organisation and its people"

At the core of the principles is people, and integrity and developing trust amongst fellow workers is fundemental.  You don't demonstrate interest in people by having a suggestion box  - horrid!  You do demonstrate interest and motivate by talking and buiding relationships.  

If you want to read more about the Work Foundation research the link is below - and Jim Collins 'Good to Great' 5th level leadership is also a good read.  Cass Centre for Charity Effectiveness will be talking more about outstanding leaders this autumn - so watch this space and pass on to your managers!

Here's the link for Work Foundation Exec Summary on "Exceeding Expectation -the Principles of Outstanding Leadership 

http://www.theworkfoundation.com/assets/docs/publications/232_leadership_execsummFINAL.pdf

I can point readers to case studies and valuable lessons from other countries. Five years plus after we issued it this publication remains, regularly, in the top ten downloads monthly from our website (with the French and Spanish versions also featuring often). I hope its of use to you - its free.

http://www.peopleinaid.org/publications/MotivatingNGOSouth.aspx