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How important do you think employee morale is to your association's productivity? I've always thought it was important, but I've been doing some reading that made me bump it up significantly.

Brad Bird, the Oscar-winning director behind movies like The Incredibles, made a great point about employee morale in a recent interview in The McKinsey Quarterly [note: registration is required to view]:

"In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie's budget -- but never shows up in a budget -- is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value."

His comment brought to mind for me a May 2007 Harvard Business Review article that made a similar point: "Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance." Psychologists Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer asked the subjects of their study on employees' inner life at work to send them daily diary entries about an event that stood out to them during each working day.

In the article, Amabile and Kramer say that "Having taken a microscope to this question, we believe strongly that performance is linked to inner work life and that the link is a positive one. People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (passion for the work), and more favorable perceptions of their work, their team, their leaders, and their organization. Moreover, these effects cannot be explained by people’s different personalities or backgrounds—which we did account for in our analyses."

What do you do at your association to raise morale and keep it high?

(Thanks to Susan Fox, whose listserver post about the Brad Bird article inspired me to take the time to read it ...)