12 Morale-Building Moves That Cost Next to Nothing
Research has shown that profits and morale are inextricably linked. But costly morale boosters can reduce that extra profit, even turning it into a net loss. It’s even worse for small businesses, who can’t afford morale-boosting programs or events because of narrow margins, even at the best of times.
The good news is there are plenty of morale-boosting options that won’t break the bank. Some cost very little, and some cost nothing but time. All of them can help your employees feel better about the company, their jobs, themselves, and their relationship with you. Here are some of our favourites.
12 Inexpensive Morale Boosters You Can Put to Work for Your Company
1. Say Thank You
When was the last time somebody sincerely thanked you for something? We’re not talking about a reflexive “thanks” after receiving a favor. We’re talking about taking a minute to thank you for what you did, in person, with sincerity.
It felt pretty good, didn’t it? If you make a habit of giving sincere, heartfelt thanks, it doesn’t just improve the morale of the person you thanked. It also creates a practice of gratitude throughout your organization.
But you have to do it right. Like apologies, a good thank you must include specific components:
- Use the person’s name.
- Say the words “thank you.”
- Identify the specific action you appreciate.
- Describe how that act mattered and what difference it made.
Don’t let those steps become a script, or you risk appreciation coming across as too formal or routine. But if you make it sincere, this can be one of the essential things you can do as a leader.
2. Offer Local Discounts
Discount deals help your employees’ bottom lines while also reminding them you cared enough to set up the discount in the first place.
At the corporate and enterprise level, you can sign up for paid discount clubs that offer substantial deals on a wide range of options, but those can be expensive.
For less-expensive operations, the old methods are still the best. Approach local restaurants, stores, gyms, and recreation spots like bowling alleys and golf courses. Most will be more than willing to offer a discount deal to your employees in exchange for the publicity and added traffic.
This takes a little time and energy to set up, but once the discount is in motion, it remains accessible for as long as the local business remains willing to hold up its end of the deal.
3. Encourage Healthy Living
A healthier life means better morale at home, in relationships, and at work. From reduced medical bills to more energy, improved relationships, and less worry, overall wellness benefits are hard to overestimate.
You already contribute to healthy living through providing health coverage for your team, a monthly bill that may be among your highest. You can also sign up for other broad-basis wellness programs that carry both powerful benefits and increased costs to you.
But those aren’t the only ways you can contribute to wellness for your team. A few examples of low-cost, high-impact options include:
- Encourage walking and standing meetings
- Focus on healthy eating options, gyms, and wellness businesses when seeking discounts
- Cover entry fees for local fun runs and similar events
- Organize a monthly fitness challenge or group activity
- Host a group fitness or wellness class
- Allow flexible working hours for better work-life balance
- Stock healthy snacks in the breakroom
As we said, these are just a few examples, provided less as a checklist and more as a starter for your imagination.
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4. Hold a Volunteer Day
Volunteer days are a one-two punch for building morale. The change from routine improves mood and productivity simply by being different. Then you add the benefits of helping others in a meaningful way.
Organize a volunteer event by making contact with local government or charitable organizations that take volunteers. Set up a day for your staff — either the entire office or just those who want to participate — to go off-site and pitch in.
You might just be cleaning their offices or inventorying donations, but you might also do something more interesting out in the field. The details will depend on the organization you work with and what they need at the time.
This option works best if the experience lasts longer than a day. Host some training sessions in the weeks ahead of time and a countdown during the week of your volunteer day. Afterward, a celebration event can extend and amplify the morale-building mojo.
5. Allow Doggie Days
Researchers at Central Michigan University found that having a dog present at group activities creates an environment that’s more “cooperative, comfortable, friendly, active, enthusiastic, and attentive.” We can’t think of a better definition of high morale than those six adjectives.
Whether you set a dog-friendly policy for your workplace in general or just have regular “bring your dog to work” days, the benefits are available at no cost to your organization.
Of course, this only happens if you do your doggie days right. A few of the most essential best practices include:
- Invite only dogs who are well-trained and up to date on vaccinations.
- Confirm nobody in a given department is allergic to dogs.
- Set aside a closet where employees can keep pet supplies.
- Clean up choking hazards, chocolate, and other hazards to dogs.
- Have a policy in place for dog care if a dog’s owner must go off-site or leave their dog for a meeting.
- Never force a dog to play with a person or a person to play with a dog.
Another exciting option for doggie days at work is to contact your local animal shelter. Many now offer events where they bring in animals for a few hours. Your employees get the benefits of some pet time, and the animals often find a new forever home.
6. Award a Trophy
Spend $50 one time on a trophy from a local shop or cruise thrift stores until you find an enormous, tacky award that will fit the bill. From that point on, the trophy becomes a rotating talisman of talent and triumph. Someone holds on to the award for a week until someone else wins it for themselves.
You can create a trophy for a particular metric, a rotating goal designed to make the award move from winner to winner, or just something fun and primarily humorous. The important thing is to keep the competition friendly, or you risk lousy sportsmanship hurting morale.
7. Make Time for Fun and Games
When you were in school, even part of a day blocked off for some kind of activity wasn’t just fun at the moment but made the whole day — or even the entire week — more enjoyable. That phenomenon works just as well for the workplace.
You can set aside a whole day for recreation, creating the workplace equivalent of a field day. Bring in games and entertainment, host a talent show, buy lunch, and make an actual holiday of it. This often works best when tied to an event or victory but can also happen just because your team deserves the break.
You can take an afternoon or morning for a short but intense event like a party, Nerf gun war, or having a team of massage therapists come in for anybody who needs one.
You can also set up games that don’t interrupt workflow but rather simply carry on throughout regular job duties. A minor prank war, whiteboard-based pun contest, or epic Post-It war creates a long-running game carried out in idle moments, boosting morale for weeks without hurting productivity.
Whatever form your fun and games take, the point is to break up the regular action of your workday. Remember that “recreation” can be pronounced “re-creation,” which is precisely what fun and games can give you.
8. Provide Salary Transparency
Many companies don’t share how much their employees earn and expressly forbid team members from discussing it. This is bad for morale and also illegal in many jurisdictions.
Salary transparency can improve morale because, among other things:
- It eliminates suspicion of pay discrimination based on gender, age, race, etc.
- It can help with career planning (more on that in a bit).
- It reduces employee overestimation of managerial pay.
- It has been shown to attract a more diverse workforce.
Of course, these benefits are only valid if the company salary policy is in line with ethics and the law. If a company did have a wide gender pay gap or massively unfair executive pay structure, it could have the opposite effect. A company with that concern can improve morale by fixing those underlying issues.
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9. Have a Food Truck Friday
Or Monday. Or Wednesday. The day doesn’t matter for this sweet morale booster.
Food trucks will come park on-site for the captive audience, usually at no charge to you. It’s hard to overstate how much this small change can make a day feel special regularly.
This may be the most straightforward item on this list. There’s no reason not to make it happen.
10. Offer Career Path Coaching
Nobody likes to feel like they’re in a dead-end job. If you take the time to help your team members look six months, a year, and five years into their futures, you can immensely improve their morale and motivation.
Career path coaching can be as simple and cost-free as quarterly sit-downs to establish goals and opportunities, with the occasional check-in dates. It can be as complex and costly as one-on-one regular mentoring complete with paid training or tuition reimbursement. Or it can fall anywhere in between.
Since we’re talking about low-cost morale-boosting options, we’ll focus on what you can do for free. Some of your team will be perfectly happy doing the job they’re doing, so you can focus on maximizing their annual performance bonus or raises. Others are working for you on their way to a different career and greatly appreciate you grooming them for wherever they want to go next. Still others will want to move up in the company and need you to show them how.
In all three cases, your help and guidance will make them more motivated to do what they’re doing today by understanding the context of their performance for their future.
11. Host an On-the-Clock Book Club
This morale booster takes three steps:
- Announce a book for the club at the beginning of the month.
- Everybody reads the book.
- Near the end of the month, have a one or two-hour meeting to discuss it on the clock.
At the least, this benefit boosts morale the same way fun and games or a volunteer day do, by breaking up the action with something new once a month. It also creates an esprit de corps between book club members, who have one more thing they share in common.
Even better, if you choose the books well, it can make all book club members that much better at their jobs by teaching new skills and building more resilient mindsets.
12. Be Present
Being a department manager or company owner is like being a parent. The bad ones encourage managers to view their employees as children and treat them accordingly. The good ones focus on the responsibility parents and managers have for the people who rely on them.
Absent, disengaged parents rarely raise happy children. Absent managers who care only about their duties and careers rarely create teams with high morale.
Show up. Be present with your people. Be mindful in the moment to show that you care about everybody in your department as a person, not just as a tool for accomplishing your personal and career goals.
Final Thought
Leading by example is one of the most important tenets of leadership, whether you’re a Fortune 500 CEO or a small-business owner. The people you lead are watching you and will learn from what they see.
If you’re constantly stressed out, unhealthy, and not enjoying yourself, your employees will see that and follow suit.
But if you embrace the challenges of your position, see to necessary self-care, and live your best life, that alone can have a powerful positive impact on morale for your whole team.
Peter Brand is a longtime business owner in Oregon, and he’s used a number of these strategies to help boost morale with his staff.
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