Article

5 Ways to Boost Employee Morale

August 02, 2024

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Emily May

Agile organizations often discuss the importance of customer feedback and sentiment. While we develop our products and services for customers, we must remember to keep an equally important stakeholder at the forefront of our minds: our team members.

Positive employee morale is crucial to sustainable organizational growth, retention, and innovation. After all, happy employees translate to happy customers.

This article provides five recommendations for agile leaders to create a work environment that supports and seeks to improve employee morale. 

Team Morale Meaning

Employee and team morale refer to one's sentiments and attitudes toward their workplace. Signs of positive team morale can include high creativity, innovative thinking, engagement, productivity, positivity, and collaboration. 

There are several contributing factors to employee morale, but some major influences include:

  • Psychological safety
  • Organizational culture
  • Workplace leadership style

    • By understanding how to support healthy team morale, agile leaders create an environment for happy, motivated teams that work together toward business goals. Additionally, a strong sense of belonging within the workplace allows employees to embrace feedback for continuous improvement and reduces turnover, saving businesses significant time and money. 

    5 Recommendations on How to Boost Morale at Work

    cartoon showing different employees happiness level

    We've gathered our top five tactics used by ICAgile leadership to maintain high employee morale, and we hope these will inspire ideas to boost morale within your organization.

    1. Reinforce Related Agile Principles

    Because agile principles lay the foundation for how agile teams function, it’s a good practice to refer back to them regularly. In the case of boosting employee morale, a few agile principles should remain top of mind, such as:

  • Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  • The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
  • Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
  • The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

    • These principles reflect a few themes that can contribute to a sense of empowerment for teams. For example, the concept of quality over quantity helps employees work together to build products they are proud of. Additionally, ruthless prioritization helps these teams decide how to use their time productively, providing the most impact to internal and external stakeholders. 

    Moreover, open communication, feedback exchange, and collaboration are standout features of the agile manifesto and principles, fostering a sense of unification and collective improvement among agile teams. 

    At the same time, granting autonomy to each team member creates a strong sense of independence, reflected in our ability to take risks, organize, and accept accountability and new responsibilities. 

    When crafting an internal strategy for improving morale, allow these principles to inspire your ideas.

    2. Invest in Employee Professional Development

    Opportunities for professional development deepen an employee’s expertise to further the organizational mission and their own personal growth. Continuing education often leads to confidence, multi-faceted skills, promotions, creativity, collaboration, and the feeling of being valued–all of which contribute to positive internal outcomes and sentiments about the workplace, reducing turnover. 

    Employee professional development can be a beneficial tactic for agile leaders who are seeking ideas on how to engage remote employees. When work is conducted completely virtual, organizations need to think strategically about providing recognition and growth to their workers. 

    For example, ICAgile provided agile training to over 1,200 employees of The Bank of New Zealand, and they’ve seen cross-collaboration within their team significantly increase. Demand and excitement continue to rise across various teams within the bank as they roll out more educational agile programs internally. 

    Apalon, a software development company, certified 338 employees with ICAgile in support of an organizational shift to adopt an agile mindset. The culture at Apalon noticeably changed after the agile training, creating more shared responsibility, open discussion, and opportunities for improvement among the team. 

    3. Encourage Work & Life Balance

    cartoon of something thinking of life outside of work

    Supporting your employees to live full, balanced lives is critical to fending off burnout and improving job satisfaction. 

    Practice human-centric ways of working that give your team members space to fulfill their lives beyond their careers through activities like volunteering, hobbies, travel, development, and enriching relationships.

    Within the ICAgile team, a flexible time off policy allows us to engage in what makes us happy, which is a healthy way to manage stress and return to the team feeling positive.

    Part of this tactic's effectiveness involves setting limits on how much work employees need to manage at once. If your team feels overwhelmed by the number of projects they need to tackle, even an unlimited time off policy likely won’t be enough to manage the team’s stress, resulting in low team morale. 

    4. Provide Tools That Improve the Work Environment

    cartoon of someone working with a chart

    Equipping your agile team with tools that support the nature of their work and enhance the organizational culture is essential to maintaining a positive and productive work environment for employees. 

    Agile teams should always integrate a project management tool into their workflow. At ICAgile, we use Jira to track our projects in a kanban-style flow, helping us budget our time effectively, meet deadlines, and gain a big-picture view of team strategy. Project management tools can transform how team members organize their work and provide necessary support for many professionals. 

    Secondly, employee engagement tools are an excellent way to foster collaboration, creating a sense of belonging and community. Tools like Miro and Mural provide many ways for team members to engage with each other and interact with the material presented. Moreover, these platforms cater to diverse learning styles, empowering all employees to participate to the best of their ability.

    Lastly, some leaders may consider distributing anonymous employee morale surveys for ongoing insights into employee sentiments and recommendations for change. Digital tools such as SurveyMonkey or Google Forms enable leaders to gather feedback without employees worrying about potential consequences, which is particularly beneficial when psychological safety is not yet fully established.

    5. Facilitate Honest Conversation

    a group of people having an honest conversation

    Open communication is fundamental to an agile mindset. Above making educated guesses and conducting surveys, nothing beats an honest conversation about how a team culture can improve. Going straight to the source gives leaders immediate insights that can turn into action.

    Encouraging open and honest conversations between employees at all levels builds individual confidence to speak up and provide feedback. Additionally, the exchange builds connections and relationships within an organization.

    To facilitate effective, long-term feedback exchange, ensure that team members don’t fear pushback or retaliation and that their opinions are always met with an open mind. As in all agile teams, feedback is the crux of continuous improvement, a healthy organizational culture, and high team morale. 

    Conclusion

    Try the tactics outlined in this article, or use them as creative inspiration to begin charting a path toward boosting morale within your team. As employee morale increases, other benefits will trail behind, such as a culture of continuous improvement, faster value delivery, and improved collaboration. 

    Are you interested in offering agile training within your team to boost employee morale? We offer courses for individual professionals and team-based learning at all levels of the agile journey. 

    We look forward to working with your team soon!

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    TAGGED AS:
    Leading Change, Agility in Leadership, Leading with Agility

    About the author

    Emily May | ICAgile, Marketing Specialist
    Emily May is a Marketing Specialist at ICAgile, where she helps educate learners on their agile journey through content. With an eclectic background in communications supporting small business marketing efforts, she hopes to inspire readers to initiate more empathy, productivity, and creativity in the workplace for improved internal and external outcomes.

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