Improving Team Morale is not an Objective

I often hear new managers say that maintaining or improving team morale is their main objective. If they manage to keep their team happy, then they would have succeeded.

While I love the intent, this is easy to disprove. You can have your team very happy by tripling their salary and telling them that they don’t even need to show up to work for the next six month. Objective fulfilled!

That’s obviously not what the company is expecting, and no one would seriously propose this plan. However, I did see companies using team morale to evaluate managers’ performance. While it comes with good intention, there are few problems with this approach.

tl;dr:

• Morale is a flawed metric that is hard to measure and hard to act on. Using it as an objective leads to misguided actions (pizza party!), obfuscating the real underlying problems.
• Morale is a byproduct of everything going on in the company. While improving it shouldn’t be an objective in itself, there are many reasons to pay attention to it.
• Instead of focusing on mood or morale, gather qualitative feedback on specific topics. This is more actionable and precise, and should help you address actual issues and not the resulting low morale that is just a side effect.

A Flawed “Metric”

Hard to measure

First, how do you even measure team morale? Surveys, audits… any option will be biased in some way.

Non-anonymous gathering of data will mostly gather positive data, because people often are afraid to share their discending opinions. The only case where people feel safe sharing problems are:

• When the team is healthy, and usually it means that you don’t have a morale issue.
• When everything is so bad that everyone know that there is an issue.

Anonymous surveys won’t work for small teams. If they are anonymous they might also bias toward negative feedback. Just like on yelp, people tend to leave reviews to complain.

Using the manager’s insights will lead to qualitative data. However they are of course biased, and they will miss or ignore problems linked to their management style.

External auditors can interview the team and give an opinion. However, once again, people might not honestly share how they feel because of fear of consequences, because they feel like the exercise is useless… or just because they don’t want to be negative with a person they don’t know.

Out of the company’s control

Then, there are simply situation where morale will dip regardless of what the company or manager does:

• Personal events. If I have someone in my family who is sick, my morale will be low even if my manager is amazing.
• Global events. If there is a global pandemic, economic collapse, war… morale will be lower regardless of what happens in the team.

Sometimes all what the manager can do is to accompany the team with empathy during those times and wait it out… but that’s pretty much it.

Dip in morale as a consequence of a good long term decision

In the same vein, there are things that could lower the team morale short term, but are actually a positive long term:

• Handling performance issues. If I’m slacking and my manager “catches” me, it’s fair to say that I’ll have low morale.
• Constructive feedback. Some people thrive on feedback, and will appreciate some guidance. Others will understand the need, but will still struggle to hear them without being a bit demoralised for a moment, no matter how they are brought up.
• Someone getting fired.There are cases where an employee has to be let go for complex reasons that simply can’t be shared with the team for legal reasons. This is of course hard to understand and will have an impact on morale.

Leads to misguided actions

Finally, by focusing on morale, managers tend to reach for actions like team building events or things outside of the normal flow of work. That’s how you get the cliché of adding ping pong tables and having a pizza party to raise spirits!

It might be slightly positive in the short term, but this won’t really improve the situation long term. Even worst, it gives the illusion of action when really it’s just a quick bandaid solution. The manager thinks they’re helping, when really it’s almost procrastination.

All that time planning this once a year outing could be spent improving the release process that makes the engineers’ life a nightmare. All that money for this party could be spent buying this one tool that everyone was asking for to make their day to day easier.

Why Paying Attention to Morale is Important

The way I see it, if you exclude the topics listed above, team morale is a byproduct of everything else.

If your colleagues are nice, the work interesting, the company with a clearly defined positive mission, processes clear, autonomy left to team members, then you’ll most likely be happy and morale will be high. The opposite is also true - no amount of pizza party can solve a broken process or toxic colleague. This is why it’s fair to look at team morale as an indicator of how things are going.

So paying attention to team morale is key for various reasons:

• As a human managing humans it’s just a good thing to have empathy. Plain and simple. You have a very high impact on your reports’ lives, so you need to be mindful of that. This part makes sense for most managers, and if it doesn’t then this person should probably not manage people.
• Having good morale makes everything easier. Less conflicts, less communication overheads… and just a more pleasant work environment for everyone. This leads to a virtuous circle of performance for the company.
• It’s a great way to find problems. If you notice a dip in morale and a lot of feedback that it’s linked to your release process, it’s probably time to take a lot at that process!

So stop looking at morale as an objective, but instead as a byproduct of company health. Identify what you have control over and improve that part. You can of course take actions specifically targeting morale, but the safest bet is to just make your work environment more pleasant, efficient and fair.

Alternative ways to gather insights

While focusing on “mood” or “morale” directly is flawed, there is value in gathering feedback about how things are going.

For this, I prefer surveys focused on a specific topic. For instance “do you have a reasonable workload” or “do you agree with this week’s company announcement”. This feels more actionable, precise and helpful than “how are you doing”. It can also be interesting to gather those feedback in the same format and at the same time across multiple teams, to see if there are any trends or outliers.

You could also run brainstorm on retrospectives on a given topic to get insights on how the team feels about a particular topic. To address even management issues, some of those could be ran without them.

It’s worth noting that, if you gather insights like this, it’s critical to have time set aside to address the main issues that will pop up. There is nothing more annoying than taking the time to surface problems for them to be ignored. If you ignore problems for long enough, people might just give up and stop mentioning the issues. Your metrics will improve, but the problem won’t be solved, which is a pretty bad spot to be in.