3 Great Ways to Increase Team Morale and Drive Your Business to the Next Level

Team morale is one of the most overlooked aspects of growing a company even though it is one of the most important keys to success.

Recall the famous tale of Spartans who held their own for three days against an expansive Persian force until all but one of them had perished. Now imagine what kind of growth you could expect from a team of people with the same level of dedication and determination as the Spartans.

That is obviously an unrealistic expectation to place on your employees and I am not suggesting in anyway that you throw your underperforming employees off a cliff, seriously, don’t do that.

But it is realistic to expect that with the right approach, you too can have a team who is consistently beating quotas, smashing goals and pushing your company to the next level.

Let’s look at 3 ways you can get spartan level motivation out of your team and take your business to the moon.

Pay Them

This one is a no brainer but business owners often think that hoarding cash is the safest way to build business. While this thinking is logically sound, in execution it is flawed. The most surefire way to build a business is to allow it to morph into a self sustaining growth machine.

In order to do so you need to take any profit that is generated and reinvest it into every aspect that is responsible for driving growth, most importantly, your team. Then, rinse and repeat.

This can be done in many ways, like; regularly scheduled raises, performance recognition bonuses, holiday bonuses, additional spending reimbursements, and heck even just sending out some company branded swag.

A dollar invested into the people that are responsible for your business operations will always be a dollar well spent.

Share Growth Metrics

This one is certainly controversial, as the private aspects of a business become more and more private as it grows. However, sharing a little insight into how things are performing and how things actually work can allow your employees to develop a deeper connection to your business which in turn motivates them on a new level.

Think about it this way; if you are in the process of growing a new department and you have just reassigned three members of an alternate team to this new project, instead of giving these members a set of tasks to complete, try giving them a top down presentation of where you want the business to go.

For example, “With the new software division of our company, we are hoping to reach one million homes by the end of the New Year. This is a tall order and we get that but lets try and break it down into digestible metrics.” It is then your job as team lead or owner to define a set of metrics that you are comfortable sharing with your team. Some metrics that I often suggest sharing are gross department revenue, marketing spend totals and total cost of expansion. The reason being, when you allow people to clearly see the impact that they are having on the companies success or failure it makes them realize their true value. It also gives them the opportunity to work towards increasing their value to the company. This works particularly well if you are also paying them bonuses for performance like previously suggested.

Promote Work Life Balance

One of the worst mistakes that you can do as a business owner is to overwork your team. Overworking leads to resentment in your workforce, causes decreased productivity during working hours and drives down team creativity. I know that it may sound counterproductive but the easiest way to encourage a team to work more is to allow them to work less.

Take for example Netflix, one of the largest and most successful companies ever built. They have unlimited paid time off for all of their employees yet there are countless reports of engineers regularly working 14 hour days. Why is that? This is not because they are secretly black mailing their engineers, it is because they have allowed proper employee freedoms, they compensate well and they allow the performance of the company to motivate their teams instead of a loud mouthed manager and a tightly regulated schedule.

Conclusion

It is important to remember that team morale is an ongoing effort that will require you to consistently adapt to your teams wants and needs. Although at first it will be difficult, with time it will become a regular part of your companies culture and your team will certainly thank you for it.