BRANDON: My name is Brandon Fish and I’m the Vice President of Human Resources here at Property Solutions.
KIMMY: I’m Kimmy Cable, Vice President of Human Resources at ClearLink.
DIANA: I’m Diana Hasselfield and I’m the Nurse Practitioner here at Varian Medical Systems.
CHAD: I’m Chad Myler. I’m the Wellness Coordinator here at USANA Health Sciences.
RANDY: I’m Randy Rasmussen, Vice President of Human Resources at Nelson Laboratories.
BRANDON: Advice for organizations to improve morale?
Bar none, the number one most important thing for me is culture.
And, if you, your culture starts at the top.
No matter how much culture you try to implement, if your leaders, your CEO,
and your Vice Presidents and your Directors aren’t living the culture and living the values,
then it’s hard to create that.
So, I think it’s so important for companies to establish fun cultures
because so many companies now have that, it’s hard to attract
good employees and good recruits if you don’t have that.
So, for me—in fact, that’s one of my main responsibilities in my job
is to own the culture and to create an environment that people enjoy,
that they love, that they want to get out of bed in the morning
and be excited to go to work. And so, to me, as an organization
you need to find the people that have the skill set to do the job,
but other than that, the number one thing I look for in any interview
is are they a cultural fit? do they like the things that we do,
that we offer as a company? And does that make them happy
and get them excited to come to work because to me, that’s the most important thing.
KIMMY: For someone that’s trying to improve morale at their office,
I think oftentimes as leaders in organizations we sit in a room
and we think we know what our people want because we feel so connected to them.
In reality, oftentimes that can be true but what we found
is that it’s more meaningful is actually to pull in employees
and have some good, effective dialogue about what’s really meaningful,
what would really add value to their work environment.
Oftentimes that can be scary because you think they’re going to ask for the Ferrari
but we’ve found that they ask for simple things like coffee in the break room.
DIANA: Well, I would say it’s really important to have open communication.
So, with our new general CEO in Palo Alto, he has a very open concept
and he puts out a lot of information to inform employees
and I think we’ve really improved on whatever the last few years.
Our general manager has made it a point to keep employees aware,
have online contests, have them have more of a buy-in and ownership over their work.
I just really think having that open communication really helps employee morale.
You know, that they’re not getting any surprises with changes in benefits or anything like that.
Our benefits are excellent and I think that, along with our open communication really makes for improved morale.
