After a long day of work, employees can expect to come home feeling tired, worn out, stressed out, and even exhausted. Work is often demanding, and the amount of work that an employee must complete in a day is not always under the control of management.
Deadlines can converge. Supply chains can be interrupted. Crises can happen.
Clients can be demanding. Orders can surge unexpectedly. Colleagues may need to take a day off without warning.
So, if you're tired at the end of the day, welcome to the club. You have plenty of hard-working company.
The more important questions are:
Do employees feel valued, respected, and appreciated? Do they believe that their contributions are important? Do their efforts provide them with a sense of satisfaction?
Or do they feel disposable, overly criticized, or under-appreciated? Do they believe that their contributions are futile? Does the work leave them feeling frustrated and miserable?
The emotional experience of the workplace is an area where management has considerable influence. If employees routinely feel demeaned, undervalued, micro-managed, brow beaten, or otherwise miserable, management isn't doing its job.
I'm going to repeat that statement in capital letters: MANAGEMENT IS NOT DOING ITS JOB.
Do your employees have to deal with difficult customers? Support them and put policies in place that help to protect them from abuse.
Do your employees feel uncertain about their future at your firm? Reassure them to the degree that you can.
Do your employees feel stressed out from an unrealistic workload? There are many solutions. Streamline the workflow. Set reasonable expectations with clients. Provide better training. Or hire more people.
Do your employees feel unappreciated, hopeless, and downtrodden? That doesn't happen when management encourages them actively.
Is there friction between employees? Talk to them separately, address what each one feels is unfair, and take action to make everyone feel listened to and respected.
Management's job is to deliver results in a timely, efficient, and ethical manner.
Miserable employees are not efficient. They're not focused on the work; they're focused on how bad they're feeling about the work. They're not focusing on the important customers; they're agonizing over the jerk that berated them (and the boss who didn't support them adequately). They don't have the company's best interest at heart; they're trying to figure out how to get through the week without having a heart attack.
When the workplace is miserable, the more talented employees will leave. The less talented will stay on but while being consumed by the hopelessness of their plight.
Management is in charge. If morale is low, some level of management bears the lion's share of the responsibility for that. Not every manager is necessarily at fault. It's not uncommon for the line manager to be constrained by financial pressure from above. But SOMEONE in the management chain is responsible for bad morale, and it's up to those people to do something about it before the entire operation falls apart.
