Why online, on demand print improves employee morale

Employee morale is crucial to any healthy organization. You want your employees to be engaged, motivated, and interested in doing their jobs well. You have probably already tried dozens of techniques to improve morale, but here’s one you may not have thought of: set up your employees with online, on demand print.

No, we’re not kidding! Here is why printing can impact your employee morale:

What is employee morale?

Employee morale is the general mood or sentiment your workers feel towards the company. When it is positive, everyone is motivated to meet the goals you set them. When morale is low or negative, they may drag their feet, spend more time grumbling than doing, or quit at a high rate. Many organizations delegate employee morale to the human resources department, but it is an essential quality that every manager should be monitoring.

What impacts employee morale?

Because employee morale is so integral to an organization’s success, there have been hundreds of studies conducted to figure out what you can do to impact morale. A lot of people’s minds jump to fun initiatives when they think “employee morale,” like holiday parties, team building activities, and off-site retreats. There are also methods such as regular employee feedback surveys, kudos structured into company-wide meetings, and recognition for staying with the company for certain amounts of time. 

However, in a study that examined the results of 140 employee-morale studies, researchers found that the overarching key to employee morale is much less flashy and more fundamental. The secret is to empower your employees.

The study highlights a few specific ways to empower employees, including:

• Empower employees to do their job well, from decentralizing authority to paying for training to giving them appropriate software and tools
• Give employees support among their peers and your peers, so that they feel like an integral part of the organization
• Make sure employees are given realistic challenges to keep them from feeling stagnant in their positions

What does employee morale have to do with online, on demand print?

At first glance, the concept of empowering employees seems far removed from print methods. That is until you calculate how much time your organization currently spends on printing. Across multiple departments, you have trainers assembling workbooks, admins stuffing envelopes for mass-mailers, sales teams binding business responses, marketing organizing brand-approved collateral, and HR printing critical employee information. If those projects are going to a print center, local print shop, or desktop printer, then each project takes hours to prepare the files, communicate with the print vendor, proof, and ship. 

That is a lot of time that your employees are spending on minutia. 

That is also why companies who switch over to online, on demand print see an improvement in team morale. Online print streamlines the process so that completing a project is as simple as uploading files, building virtually, and placing the order. For many teams, like the RFP team at Siemens, this reduces a print project from taking up a full day to taking up a few minutes.

In other words, online, on demand print empowers employees to do their jobs better by giving them a tool to simplify a complex process. It improves morale because it helps employees do their job well because they can save time and focus on the parts of their role that most excites them.

When considering employee morale, it is important to focus on communication, leadership, and empowerment. However, as the studies show, morale is so much more than a monthly shout-out session. By investing the time to set up the right tools for each department, you will improve morale because your employees will be prepared to excel in their jobs. If you need to save your employees time while printing, schedule a call to learn more about how Mimeo can help!