MBA1314 5 Low Cost Ways to Boost Team Morale

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. No fluff, just the good stuff. Daily ten minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a coupley business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn five Low Cost Ways to Boost Team Morale when you're building a business and you're working on things day in and day out, things can get mundane. People can start having low levels of energy and motivation. Your job as a leader is to do what you can to boost morale on a regular basis. It's like what they say about motivation. It's like showering. It's recommended to be done daily. But hey, I totally get it. You can't spend thousands of dollars on fancy gifts or trips every so often. So today's episode is all about how to boost team morale. When you're on a budget, when you need the dollar to stretch, or even when you can't spend money at all, what can you do to make people on your team feel valued, feel significant, and feel better about working where they work. Your team, your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. We got five ways to share with you to boost team morale in A low cost fashion. So let me jump right into number one. This one's simple, yet extremely powerful and it's to recognize your employees. Now I recommend you do this both individually and as a team. So I'm going to give you an actual practical example that we do at Webinar Ninja, our webinar software with our customer service department. We have a set goal for our CSAT score, which is customer service satisfaction. When customers email support, when they contact support and support helps them out, they get an automated email. The customers get an automated email asking them to review their interaction with support. It's basically a scale from one to five with star eyes as the, you know, number five, the best amazing wow experience. The next one would be smiley face and it'll be a neutral face. The point here is that the customer reviews them and gives them a CSAS score every month. We have a goal like 97% customer satisfaction or higher. But we also have a friendly competition amongst the team. So we have one goal, for the team to hit a collective score every month or higher. And then we also have the customer agent of the month and that's the person with the highest CSAT score as well as a high audit score. We do audits for all our customer service tickets. They get a monthly audit report and it's basically a spot check on how things are going and how they've replied to customers to solve their issues. So those two scores, the CSAT and the audit score, gets aggregated into a agent score at the month and somebody gets agent of the month and it's just that recognition. Hey, we are recognizing you as a baller, as a superstar, as a ninja. Well done. And same thing for the team. You recognize the team for their hard work when they hit the those milestones. We do something very simple which is a virtual pizza party for the team when they hit their team score. And basically it's we cover pizza and drinks for everybody on the support team when they hit that goal. And everybody kind of sends pictures and shares pizza together for the agent of the month. It's a simple gift card, very low cost. It's not something that's going to break the bank, but it makes a whole lot of difference. It also keeps your team on their toes and healthy competition as well as team camaraderie to work together for a common goal, that pizza party. So recognizing your employees individually and as a team is a real morale booster. That's number one. Number two, show your employees the results of your work. The results, it makes them feel so Good when they know they're working towards something. And when I say results, it could be things like C stat scores, like a score of a satisfaction of the customer, but also could be reviews, great emails you get from customers, comments that customers make about your product when you're on a call or on a webinar. You know, often when I do webinars, I get comments in the webinar saying, hey, I'm a user webinar ninja. I love this software. It's amazing. Your support's amazing. Of course I'm going to screenshot those things and share it with my team to make them feel good. I share with engineering team, I share with the whole team because hey, everybody contributed to get to that goal. So any kind of results you get from from the customers, share it with the team. When I send out an email with an update and I get replies saying, hey, this is an amazing update, what a feature. You just read my mind. I post those things in our engineering message board and our slack channels and let them know that hey, great job. They love what they see. Your work paid off and you recognize them and at the same time they see the fruits of their labor. So make sure you share the results, share the glory with your team. Number two, is very easy, no cost, and something that you can do on a regular basis. Number three, offer training. Training is one of the things that a lot of people forget about. People want to get better, they want to improve. They want to feel like they're growing as a person, as a professional. Training could be conducted by you. It could be, you know the product or you know your customer so well that you give them a session about, hey, here is an overview of who our customers are. You're going to help your team in so many ways to create a better product, to understand what they're working for, to better serve them, all that kind of stuff. You can of course outsource the training. You can get a guest speaker, you can get somebody to speak on a topic that they are looking to learn. You can finance some inexpensive courses for them to improve their skills. It could be somebody who's trying to improve their coding skills in a new language, or maybe they're looking to improve their English. If they're a foreign speaker, like they're a non native speaker. English lessons can be paid for for pretty low cost. It's not super expensive. Or at the very least, give them a budget to buy books. This is a great perk and this is actually a great gift. This is something that we want to Introduce in our team where we basically say, hey, this is your budget. You can order books or you can request books and we'll, you know, we'll buy them. Whether they're Kindle or they're hard copy, soft copy, whatever. Books are a great mini investment into training and improving somebody. Somebody may want to attend a local conference which is going to cost $100 or $200 for a ticket. Not super expensive, but it'll make a world of a difference for them. They're representing the company, they're learning a lot. They can bring back and you can say, hey, why don't you give us a quick training, a quick 30 minute, one hour overview, what you learned at that conference to the whole team so they can cascade it to the rest of the team. So training is a huge, huge plus and a great morale booster. Number four, create a clear path for upward mobility for your team. This kind of ties with training, but when people on your team see that, hey, there is a way for them to kind of move up in their career where they see people get promoted, positions get opened. You're hiring. If you're hiring staff, let the whole team know. Let them know that you're looking to grow the team. If somebody's getting promoted, make an announcement, Let them know, hey, this person is getting promoted to this new position. Let them know that, hey, people on this team improve and grow. Whether they're going from, you know, maybe a support agent to a lead agent, to a customer service manager, whether they're an engineer or a developer, to lead developer to whatever. Promotion should be celebrated and it should be talked about in your organization. Also, when you have openings, make sure everybody knows that there's an opening, allow them to apply for it, they're interested. And also say, hey, if you know somebody, make sure you refer them. We actually have a referral bonus that we do for those who people refer to employees to us and they pass their three month probation. When I say referral bonus, that's when you refer somebody, they get a little bit of a bonus, a bit of cash to say thanks for recommending somebody. That is a great fit. Now you might be thinking, why is that a morale booster? Yeah, there's a cash incentive, but it also allows them to say, hey, I'm proud of where I work. I want to encourage other people to work here too. They talk you up, they talk about the company. They also help the new employee onboard and improve and get better so they can be successful as well and get that bonus. All right, last but not least, the fifth morale booster when you're on a budget. Small birthday gifts. When somebody has a birthday, you can give them a small gift, a gift certificate, even a card, even something just like recognizing the fact that they're a birthday, singing them happy birthday. This ensures that at least once a year, they feel extra special. A year flies by, and sometimes we forget to give everybody their individual attention. But when you do, it means so much to them. Wow. They remembered. Wow. They said happy birthday to me. Wow. They got me something a little special. It's not going to break the bank, but at the same time, it's going to make a huge impact. It means that you care and that you see them more than just as somebody who's going to plug away and work at your company.

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Guys, there's huge companies out there that can't keep their employees because of the culture, because people don't feel recognized or feel valued. Just implementing some of these small things can boost morale, make people feel good about where they work. But here's a simple one, a very simple one that I learned very early on when I was a manager, early in my career, back in teaching, I was 25 years old, and I was managing a team of 30 teachers that were tired and frustrated and overworked. And I realized the power of appreciation. You can really make people feel good and do things for you because they feel appreciated. Something as simple as just saying thank you to people, remembering to say thank you. Hey, can you do X, Y, Z? Thank you. I really appreciate you being on top of this. Your dedication means a lot to me. Thank you. We greatly appreciate your efforts. And just genuinely saying it and feeling it and not just, you know, giving them lip service, it makes a big difference. Some people are just not used to it. And when it hits them, they're like, wow, these people are different. I feel valued. And you do value them, so just show it. Sometimes we forget to show it. And by showing it, it gives people that boost to feel like, okay, at least I'm working hard and I'm appreciated. You know, compensation is one thing, but appreciation is a whole other thing. And some people just don't get it at their jobs and it causes them to look elsewhere. All right, thank you so much. That wraps up today's episode. I hope you found it useful. Tomorrow's Q and A Wednesday. If you have a question you want to ask right here on the show, go ahead and email me@omar NBA.net and I'll answer it right here on the show on Q and A Wednesday. Tomorrow we got a question from from one of our listeners. George asks, hey, I really don't like writing, but I want a blog. I want to be able to build my SEO, my search engine optimization. Can I hire out for a writer for my blog? And that's a great question I'll be answering in tomorrow's episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it again. If you have a question, email me@omar mba net so we can make sure we take care of it right here on the show. Helping you and the others listening. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. I understand that not everybody is an extroverted, overly enthusiastic, you know, expressive person. But you have to try. You have to try to do these things because they're relying on you. They're looking to you for leadership, for motivation, for support. So even if you do it in your own introverted, quiet way, it will be appreciated. They'll recognize you're making an effort. And not only will they recognize it, they'll know it's genuine because they know that you're doing it for them. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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