If your company is suffering from poor morale, you need to fix it before it spreads throughout all your talent. Talented professionals don't stay for long in an unhappy environment. This should come as no surprise, but poor morale happens now and then and it has to be addressed head on before it becomes toxic.

There's no magic bullet to save falling morale. Chances are, if your employees are not engaged, you're probably doing a handful of things wrong.
Christoph Lueneburger, the author of A Culture of Purpose: How to Choose the Right People and Make the Right People Choose You, writes in Harvard Business Review that bouncing from strategy to strategy to engage employees doesn't work. What he found to work is aligning your company with a purpose and running towards that goal.
"Purpose is a pledge to do the right things, making the company a force for good and a creator of value for all stakeholders, especially employees. An organization exhibits 'a culture of purpose' when this collective pursuit effectively defines the behavior of the whole," writes Lueneburger, who runs the private equity practice at global executive search and talent strategy firm Egon Zehnder.
If your company is vacant of a greater purpose, except to sell stuff and collect money, it's time to start brainstorming. Companies that do not devote themselves to something bigger than profit will not have engaged employees. Making money is great and many people just want to make the bucks and go home. But in a competitive market for talent, you need your employees to work for something more than you bottom line.
Below, read about the purpose-driven initiatives that helped two companies turn around their morale and declining revenue.
American Standard's Flush for Good
In 2012, American Standard was bankrupt. The sanitation company, which is more than 100 years old, brought on Jay Gould as CEO to turn things around.
The turnaround didn't involve longer hours or cutting benefits; it was about rekindling purpose in the corporate empire. "A key part of its 2013 turnaround was reaching out to places where there is no plumbing and sanitation therefore remains a life-and-death issue," Lueneburger writes. American Standard teamed up with the Gates Foundation and built a plastic toilet pan that could be connected to latrine pits in the developing world via a tight seal, which would help prevent the transfer of disease. Similar to shoe company Toms, American Standard started a one-for-one campaign, Flush for Good, in which the company pledged to donate a latrine cover to countries in need for every Champion brand toilet sold.
By the end of 2013, sales increased by 62 percent. In just under two years, American Standard nearly quadrupled its revenue, and morale did a 180-degree turn. "When I first got here, you saw people walking with their heads down in the hallways. Now you can feel the energy and optimism inside our company," Gould tells Lueneburger.
Hewlett-Packard's Matter to a Million
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, who joined the team in 2011, recently split the struggling tech giant into two publicly traded companies as part of her five-year turnaround plan. But that wasn't intended to fix its morale problem. To help engage her employees, Whitman launched the Matter to a Million micro-loan program with the Hewlett-Packard Foundation and nonprofit Kiva. The program gave each of HP's 270,000 employees $25 Kiva credits and told them they could give micro-loans to low-income entrepreneurs in impoverished countries.
Within six months, 115,000 employees made loans totaling more than $5.5 million. Although HP still has its own financial problems, Lueneburger says the value of the morale boost from its philanthropic endeavor is "incalculable."
What purpose does your company have? Let us know in the comments below.