Page 126 - Anne Bruce - Building A HIgh Morale Workplace (2002)

106 Building a High Morale Workplace

Tips for Creating Enthusiasm in Jobs
Tough on Morale
• Create a feeling of belonging.
• Take everyone on a field trip for team building and re-energize their
commitment to one another.
• All employees are managers’ internal customers; therefore, man-
agers serve their employees, not the other way around.
• Give workers the tools they need to do the job.
• Treat everyone with respect.
• Make eye contact and greet everyone when you first come to
work.
• Say “Please” and “Thank you.”
Source: Monica Hamden, managing partner of Macaroni Grill in
Sacramento, California.

from high turnover and low morale. Every time you turn
around, it seems like another bank is merging, acquiring, fold-
ing, downsizing, upsizing, or restructuring.

One former executive vice president at one of the nation’s
leading banking institutions in Charlotte, North Carolina—we’ll
call him Mark—puts it this way:

Banking has traditionally been very bureaucratic when it
comes to making people feel valued. High morale was

never a priority when I was in the industry. Top leadership
at our bank handed down mandates and in turn that made
people at all levels below that feel small and insignificant.
Tellers, loan officers, and other frontline workers took the
brunt of customer dissatisfaction on a daily basis and then
got little or no support from the organization.

Leadership committees rolled out strategic plans
promising to change things and never even asked for
feedback from the people who actually were doing the
jobs. When this happened, it killed morale big time. To

our frontline employees, every memo was just another
meaningless directive imposed from the top, a lot of
empty strategies created by top brass in ivory towers who
had nothing to do with day-to-day banking reality and