NAM: How Companies Can Boost Morale
CorrExpo Panel (CONT’D FROM PAGE 58)
that they haven’t worked a lot of places that have those check-ins and that shares all of that information with them. We also do charity lunches with employees. We invite vendors, family members, and anybody to come onsite where we cook lunch for hundreds of people and raise money. One that we recently did was for an employee of ours whose grandson was fighting cancer. So that’s a very pos- itive thing for our employees just from that engagement piece and making them feel a part of everything that’s go- ing on. Case: One of the things with scheduling that we found, both for recruiting folks and for retaining them, has been the shift schedule. We had a swing shift between first and second. Every two weeks they would swing back and forth and then third shift was always stationary on third shift. And the swing was really challenging for parents.
After a global pandemic and amid considerable economic strain, worker morale may not be everything a company hopes. So what can leaders do to boost communication and restore a sense of excitement and purpose? The Innovation Research Interchange — the NAM’s in- novation division — recently published a whitepaper on morale building, drawing on copious existing research as well as consultations with leaders in a range of industries (from aerospace to consumer goods). Here are some of its key recommendations. Senior leaders in the trenches: The best way to under- stand company morale (or its absence) is to go looking for it. In one notable case, FM Global Chief Science Officer Lou Gritzo spent a day working in each company lab, so he could understand where communication and cooperation needed improvement. Thanks to this experiment, Gritzo was able to “open lines of communication up and down the organization,” according to the IRI, leading to both an improved flow of information and greater comfort among lab staff in making independent decisions. “For others looking to try their hand at being a (not so) undercover boss, [Gritzo] recommends setting out rules of the road in advance,” the IRI paper notes. “The goal is to create a dialogue, not make guarantees that things will change. The change comes from the relationships built.” Support for midlevel managers: Many participants in the IRI’s roundtables and interviews agreed that midlev- el managers have only become more crucial in recent years—which explains why these managers are often very stressed. Amid the pressures of the pandemic, companies began offering more support and coaching for middle managers, according to earlier IRI research. One organization studied by the IRI and its research partner, Babson College, brought in coaches to work with managers—but not just for one-off sessions. “The exter- nal coaches were brought in multiple times during a one- year period in order to observe leadership styles and gave feedback openly,” which led to improved communication and greater autonomy among the managers. Everyone an innovator: Another way to boost morale is to make sure great ideas are always recognized, no matter who comes up with them. At ICL Group, leaders devised a novel way to encour- age innovative thinking: “an online platform that allowed anyone at ICL Group to propose an idea, have it reviewed by management, voted on by frontline staff and assigned to the appropriate team for implementation.” The platform has proved very popular, according to one senior leader, who said, “Everybody has just been blown away by how many ideas people have entered and [how many employees] continue to do it.” To read more, visit nam.org .
If you had a single parent on sec- ond shift, they didn’t have anybody to get their kid off the school bus. I don’t know that we’ve really figured out a good way to do that to fix it, but it’s something that is on the mind of ev-
Casie Case
eryone at the plant right now. It’s a union plant so it’s one of those things where it’s harder to make those kinds of changes. That is one of the biggest problems we ran into when we were recruiting people was ‘Oh, you don’t have a straight day shift, there’s no way I can work for you,’ so getting creative is really im- portant for that. I don’t think we found, at least in the plant I was at, a good solution for some of those things yet, but it’s certainly top of mind. One of the other big things for retaining people is mak- ing sure that the people that we hire are a good fit quickly and firing them quickly if they’re not. There’s nothing that will make your really good employees more upset and want to leave than you leaving a person in a spot who shouldn’t be there, right? So, if they are not any good, get rid of them quickly. We worked with our union to extend our probationary period to six months, which is a really long time, and the union was supportive of that because they don’t want to have to deal with those people that are the problem in the future. They don’t want to have to go through arbitration and all that time to deal with these people. So work where you can with the unions to get those extended probationary periods so that you can have that review time because for one month people can hold it to- gether sometimes and seem like they’re doing a good job. But at six months — by that time they’ve usually shown what their true colors are. Making sure that you’re not los- ing people in that review system is huge, and making sure that they’re staying engaged in that kind of thing is really important for retention too.
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September 18, 2023
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