If you know anything about people, and I assume you do considering you are one, then you will know that in order for someone to do well in life, they need to feel good about themselves. The same argument can be put forward in a working situation; in order for someone to go the extra mile and to really excel in their job, they need to feel good about it all, and they need to enjoy it.
As an employer, it is your job to ensure the morale of your employees is high. This is in your best interests in so many ways.
A workforce with a high level of morale is more productive, and we all know what productive means - profitable. It’s more than just cash however, as a productive workforce also means a healthier workforce, a happier workforce, a workforce that will come up with creative and interesting ideas and solutions to problems.
It’s win win on so many levels.
There are many ways you can increase morale, but one lesser known route is about learning.
Yes, encouraging your staff to learn and develop their skills and knowledge has a directly positive impact on morale.
How Does Learning Make People Feel Good?
You might wonder how this can be the case, because most people dread training courses, but that’s normally because they’re mandatory and not at all interesting. Sometimes we have to do training sessions in order to learn something necessary, e.g. fire safety. Making those training courses as fun and engaging as possible is the number one way to hold attention and stop this ‘boring learning’ culture taking hold.
In this case however, we’re not talking about mandatory training sessions, we’re talking about lifelong learning and helping your staff to learn new skills and develop the ones they already have. We’re talking about allowing them to learn something connected to their job, but something they enjoy and want to know more about.
How does it make you feel good? Think about anything you’ve mastered in the past; did you feel good once you learnt about it and actually understood it? How did it make you feel the first time you used your new skills? Probably great, right?
Learning helps us feel useful, it helps to boost our confidence, and in the workplace setting, it helps us to feel like our employer cares about us enough to actually try and improve our skills further.
All of this can have a fantastic effect on morale, and also helps to bring new skills and knowledge to the workplace too.
There’s no downside!
Identify Learning Styles
What you shouldn’t do however, is push someone to learn something which they really don’t want to learn, or in a way in which they don’t want to learn. This will backfire and have the opposite effect. We all have a specific learning style, and identifying the types of learners you have in your workplace will help you to create sessions which are useful and interesting to them.
For instance, you might have a lot of visual learners, and that means you need to make training sessions visually appealing.
You might have lots of ‘hands on’ learners, and in that case you need to make training sessions practical and less theory-based.
This video is also useful for helping you seek out ways of informal learning, which may work well for specific members of staff.
There are many ways to help someone learn. You could have a learning zone within your office, e.g. a space with computers where people can do online training courses in their own time, or within a specific portion of work time. You could also send members of staff to specific training courses or conferences, and ask them to report the information learnt back to the rest of their colleagues.
You could have in-house training sessions and rotate the members of staff who attend at specific times, to ensure your office is always fully staffed.
Of course, you could also allow your staff to do out of work training which is funded by the company. This is something which many large organisations do, e.g. they have training funds which can be accessed by their staff when they want to pursue a specific qualifications, provided it has a direct link to their current position.
Whichever learning route you go down, there is no denying that encouraging staff to continue learning and developing themselves as a whole is a great morale booster.