Month: May 2009

Boosting Employee Morale

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In today’s economy, there seems to be a never ending supply of bad news.  If you aren’t careful, you can let all this negative news overwhelm you.  When it comes to the workplace, it has become increasingly important for employers to boost employee morale.  Bad attitudes do not help business.

What can employers do when the economic situation doesn’t allow for salary increases and can often times necessitate a decrease in employee benefits or even pay cuts for those lucky enough to keep their jobs?  

These are tough times.  Businesses are forced to cut back in all those areas and employees must do more with less.  That doesn’t mean your employees aren’t valued, however.  Communicating that is critical and it will generate a level of goodwill that will carry us through this recession. 

How can struggling employers do that?

It requires a little creativity, but often little to no money at all.  Consider the following:

  • Employee of week/month/quarter (gets a free, close parking spot for a specified period of time)
  • Reward accomplishments (biggest sales, highest customer satisfaction ratings, etc., gets a half day that month, free lunch or some other small acknowledgement)
  • Allowing employees to leave an hour or two early on a Friday (or making it regular would be even better, if employer can afford it) This works wonders!
  • Ice cream social (three different flavors of ice cream, then do-it-yourself toppings)
  • Raffles for baseball or other sports tickets
  • Personal recognition by CEO of birthdays or work anniversaries
  • Potluck lunches
  • Mailbox treats (the university where I teach put microwave popcorn in each mailbox with a note attached saying, “Thanks for all you do to keep us Popping!”)

Employees are people and they desire what we all want—respect, recognition and reward incentives.  There is light at the end of the tunnel.  This recession will not last forever.  Together companies and employees can tough it out and will emerge much stronger.

Morning Blend Clip

Keep Standards High

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Why should we care about Maureen Dowd’s plagiarized paragraph in Sunday’s New York Times? 

As we all know, journalism is rapidly changing.  Newspapers across the country struggle to survive and far too many fold.  The instant access to information on the Internet is both wonderful and scary.  It’s great to get news about a situation as it is happening and often in the form of first-hand accounts.  In this rush to be first, there are often many inaccuracies reported and the editing process seems to be all but obsolete. 

Perhaps, Dowd really did inadvertently use the paragraph from Josh Marshall’s blog.  Failure to attribute properly is plagiarism, however.  A quick check using Google would have caught this “mistake” and it’s hard to understand how Dowd and the New York Times editors didn’t catch this.  After Jayson Blair’s very public firing in 2003 for admittedly much more flagrant ethical infractions, one would hope the New York Times would do more to safeguard its integrity. 

The message that must be shared is that stealing another’s work and attempting to pass it off as our own is wrong and it is intolerable.  This is the primary message I teach my college students in their first writing course. 

Note:  This was published as an editorial in the Milwauke Journal Sentinel on May 21, 2009.