Page 24 - Anne Bruce - Building A HIgh Morale Workplace (2002)

4 Building a High Morale Workplace

Home Depot—A Wildly Successful,
High-Performing Organization
Five-time recipient of Fortune magazine’s America’s Most
Admired Retailer award, Home Depot is considered to be a wildly
successful and high-performing organization—a company that’s
enjoyed year after year of record-breaking profits and has been touted
as the largest home improvement company in the nation.
But above all, Home Depot is recognized for its positive corporate
culture, a culture that inspires employee commitment and unrelenting
morale and enthusiasm. Home Depot operates on the belief that a
company that wants to inspire a passionate commitment to taking
care of its customers must first show a passionate commitment to
taking care of its people. In other words, if you take care of the inter-
nal, the external will take care of itself.
The success of Home Depot’s positive corporate culture rests on
three important points: 1) to treat employees right at all times, 2) to
maintain a high morale atmosphere where every employee is an
“owner” in the company, not just an employee, and 3) to build a feel-
ing of family, not just among employees but throughout the communi-
ty. Home Depot shows how it cares about its people with adoption
assistance, ethics workshops, a fund that matches dollar-for-dollar
employee donations to charities, programs that inspire a diverse work-
force, and unpaid leave for up to six months for employees with seri-
ous family problems.
Home Depot’s credo: live the passion and success follows.

care about them, listen to what they have to say, and discover
how quickly you’ll be able to create an atmosphere that’s capa-

ble of surviving continuous change, stress, and fear of the
unknown. Start now and watch your environment become wild-
ly successful.

What Are You Doing to Build Morale?

The impact of morale is wide and varied. Morale directly affects
the motivation of employees and can greatly influence their
ability to perform. The attitude of your employees toward you
and the organization can make all the difference. Answer these

questions to see if you and your organization are demonstrating