Is morale the new business metric?

C-suite! Are you talking about company morale at the board level?

From almost every conversation we have with clients, be they enterprise CEOs wanting to achieve more from less, scale-up COO's wanting to protect the quality of work whilst onboarding at scale, or SME's conscious of project-driven burnout, it's becoming startling how much so many organisations could benefit from better morale.

Marines marched on two things: their bellies, and their morale. If one of those two key ingredients were missing, performance would suffer in one way or another.

A lack of morale has a staggeringly negative impact on the workforce. People will disengage, burn out, lose sight of the mission, drop performance, and likely walk away.

When looked at, they are some of the biggest costs and pain points of a business, which are discussed at the board level. And at the heart of all these challenges is morale.

A lesson I learnt well in the marines, was that morale was not just the responsibility of the senior leadership, rewarding a unit with a night away somewhere, a bit of time off, or just a terrible officer joke.

It was predominately the responsibility of the sergeants and corporals of troops. The equivalent of managers or team leaders in the civilian world. They were the backbone of morale. If they couldn't lift the teams, then a miserable feeling would only fester. And the leaders I met were experts at this.

Morale isn't happiness or positivity. They are just lovely fluffy words that are actually rather intangible. Morale, however, is where engagement, retention, well-being, and performance lie. And more importantly, where resilience lies.

If a company's employees have higher morale and greater resilience, then the possibilities are endless.

Our belief at Loopin is that morale should be taken extremely seriously in a business because, without it, your company could be zombie walking towards a disaster.