Page 159 - Anne Bruce - Building A HIgh Morale Workplace (2002)

Winning Back Morale in Emotional Times 139

Managers Lose When Employees Give Up
As manager, it’s up to you to inspire your workers—even
in the face of tragedy—to never give up or give in.The
moment your employees give up, you will lose the battle for regaining
hope and happiness in your organization. Remind your employees of
this inspiring exhortation by Winston Churchill, from October 1941,
when war made the future of Britain uncertain:“Never give in, never
give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or
petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

Fighting Back with Confidence in Emotional Times

So how does a manager fight back? What’s it going to take to
get employees fired up and motivated after they’ve experienced
a horrendous event?
One manager of a real estate company where two employ-

ees were shot and killed by a disgruntled ex-employee offers
these suggestions on winning back morale in emotional times.

Of course we were all devastated. We are a tight-knit
group of workers. It’s more like a family here and turnover
is very low. When this happened there was severe trauma

to my employees. We all got crisis counseling but after
that we still needed to get back on the horse, so to speak,
and it was very hard. Morale was so low and people were
scared all the time. We purposely used this cowardly

attack to redirect our intense feelings and anger and to
regain our high employee morale.
We all agreed that we could win if we used this cow-
ardly attack as a spur to boost our productivity and not let
it put us out of business. We owed this to our families, our

co-workers who lost their lives, and to ourselves.
We wanted to fight back with our attitudes, not our
anger, for the sake of our employees who lost their lives
and for the sake of our own mental health.
We created a trust account for the families of our co-

workers who lost their lives and that motivated us to boost
sales so that we could all contribute a portion of our com-