How to navigate through low team morale

Amidst the continuous onslaught of layoffs, cutbacks on budgets, market uncertainty and all round inflationary pressure, something has got to give. People's morale, self-beliefs and their overall performance in their lives.

People will often play it defensive, keeping jobs by doing the minimum( quiet quitting they call it), intensify political games to keep their roles and over forecast and over estimate their value they bring to a business, again to stay in the game and protect themselves.

It is natural human instinct and one that is not unusual as we already saw during the pandemic, where people were losing motivation, experiencing burnout and increasing the political games.

What we can do however is to work with everyone :

Begin from mental preparation to create feelings of trust and eventually the physical response and rewards

1) Identify these cues of fear, anxiety, uncertainty on the team

2) Respond to these challenges through careful actions and strategy

3) Reward behaviors and actions that can help overcome these challenges, such as good examples of personal growth and resilience

Things are not going to be rosy and everyone is going to be struggling at some point. However many solutions in a rush, often negate the mental preparation part but just drive towards the team's response. Just do more calls, work harder, take on additional tasks, volunteer to do other team's work etc and hope for the best! It is critical to know people start from how they feel, before they process how they think and eventually act. The solution of just adding more is what is resulting in all the issues we are facing in the workplace today!

I share an example of a customer whom we proudly managed to help most recently who had some serious morale issues internally.

They had many critical roles they were struggling to fill with multiple aged vacancies.

• People didn't want to work in the obvious long hours, high ambiguity environment they were known to have
• People didn't want to work in a place they felt inferior or outnumbered due to lack of Diversity and Inclusion. Hiring managers tend to hire people that look like themselves on CV
• Current hiring managers had no interest in adding more staff though they needed it, due to the belief of inferior candidates. Hiring managers tend to hire people who they felt were as good as themselves

What we did for them?

• We discussed with the hiring managers the change in culture they will need in order to themselves, get out of the 12 - 14 hour work day issues and high ambiguity challenges which they are stressed out about
• We gave a clearer Employer Brand communication plan to people who applied, to assure what was real, that change is taking place but on the overall what the opportunities in some ambiguity might represent in the short and long term
• We showed and measured how with every hire, the long hours and ambiguity was reducing as there was more trust and transparency in what everyone in the team was doing

The CEO was happy because he overcame the mental stress of the ideas that were sitting in the meetings, which could not be delivered due to lack of time = physical manpower and trust of manpower. There were great intrinsic rewards from the team from the efforts as they felt happier and better work in the team and the overall organization.

Simply, the way to increase morale in this difficult time is to stick to the basics of identifying what are the cues of stress, responding to them not only physically but emotionally for the team and finally reward and encourage the good action outcomes that can create a repeat of the cycle.

It takes 11 right behaviors, to erase 1 wrong behavior and the repeat of it so know that it has to be kept up and repeated, for a lasting culture.