Does Company Merch Improve Morale Among Your Employees?

At first glance, it might not seem like some branded merchandise would do much for company and employee morale. After all, if morale is suffering, there's a pretty good chance that the reason runs a lot deeper than a unified look and probably isn't going to be solved with a t-shirt, jacket, or cap. In some cases, it can even feel insulting.

At the same time, though, branded company swag can be a nice fringe benefit for employees in certain situations. It can, in fact, improve morale if you do it right. But that's a big caveat, isn't it? Let's talk about it.

How Company Merch Can Improve Employee Morale

There are quite a few ways in which branded merchandise can help improve employee morale. There's a significant asterisk beside that statement, though, which we'll talk about later. First, let's look at the ways in which company merchandise can help.

It can boost your team spirit.

Branded clothing items, such as t-shirts, hats, jackets, and other clothing, can foster a sense of unity within your workforce. When everyone is wearing the same sorts of items, everyone feels more like part of a team. This in-group bonding helps your employees feel more like they belong together and feel connected both to each other and to the company as a whole.

Note that if you're trying to foster a sense of uniformity and inclusion within your organization by giving your employees branded clothing, you also need to make it an expectation to wear those items to work. Everyone owning a piece of merch isn't as beneficial to morale as everyone wearing that merch. However, if this clashes with your employee comfort or with your brand image in other ways, it can be better not to force it.

Branded clothing can also be a part of recognition and reward for employees who show exceptional performance or dedication. Branded apparel as a sort of performance incentive might not be as valuable as a tangible monetary reward or something more traditionally award-like (like a trophy or recognition in the Employee of the Month Hall of Fame), but it can still be a tangible, valuable, and memorable way of recognizing performance.

It can help create a unified professional image.

People like working for companies that, to put it bluntly, "have their s*** together." Presenting a professional image with branded items, ranging from stationery and pens to water bottles to electronics and tech gadgets (like USB devices, charging pads, and battery packs), can go a long way towards helping your company feel like it's well-run and well-managed.

This does, however, require two things. The first is that your company is actually well-run enough that it doesn't clash with the idea of adding branding to everyday-use items. The second is that those items need to be high quality. No one wants to be forced to use branded pens when those pens frequently dry up, scratch paper, and are otherwise unpleasant to use. Make sure the branded items you circulate are a boon to your employees and not a source of minor, ongoing, everyday stress.

It can help increase employee engagement and retention.

These days, upward mobility within an organization is rare and difficult. The current workplace culture is more about working in a given role for a few years before jumping ship to another company for an increase in pay, job title, and responsibility. Employee loyalty to companies is way down.

Of course, the reason for this is that the loyalty of a company towards its employees is also down. With no vesting into pensions, no long-term benefits, no recognition, and no mobility, employees don't stand to gain anything by being loyal.

Company merch can help with this. It's not going to solve the whole problem, of course! No one is going to skip a $20k annual pay raise because they're a year away from a company shirt. But, if you have other ways that retention is boosted and other benefits for sticking around, it can be a nice bonus on top of other things.

All of these methods and opportunities are ways that branded merchandise can help build a broader and more engaged workforce, but it's never quite so easy, is it? Let's talk about the huge roadblock you need to overcome first.

When Branded Merchandise Fails to Improve Morale

We've mentioned this a couple of times, but let's make it clear.

Branded merchandise can only improve employee morale if it's already in a good place.

If your employees are struggling and stressed, giving them t-shirts isn't going to help. If your employees are seeking new jobs because of stagnant wages, giving them jackets with the company logo on the back isn't going to pay their bills. If your employees are overworked and struggling to meet deadlines, encouraging them with branded baseball caps is just insulting.

You can see this time and time again all throughout the world. This article has a bunch of examples, like:

• An employee appreciation gift of a $1 keychain flashlight with a brand on it.
• An employee working double shifts for months and receiving nothing more than a handful of trinkets.
• A team that excelled getting a display of products that were not to be touched.

While you can see, in some of these cases, that there was some thought behind them, how much does the thought really count? In a way, it's similar to the freelancer "for exposure" discussion; artists don't want to work for exposure because exposure doesn't pay the bills. Employees don't want their appreciation to be a pizza party and a t-shirt because they can't pay rent with that t-shirt.

The key here is to recognize that branded items, whether it's stationery, apparel, gadgets, watches, drinkware, or something else entirely, aren't meant to be the way you solve a morale problem. Rather, it's a way to take average-to-good morale and make it better. It's a bonus on top of other, more tangible actions you take.

In a sense, you can think of branded merchandise as a modifier rather than a bonus. If morale is good, it modifies that morale to be a little bit better. If morale is bad, it modifies that morale to be a little bit worse.

If you take anything away from this post, let it be this: get your house in order first, and then decorate it. Make sure your employees are paid a satisfactory amount for their role, location, and the competition available. Make sure your benefits package is on par with or better than the industry standard. Make sure your individual employee workloads are reasonable and that you aren't overloading your staff and risking widespread burnout. Make sure your management is competent, agreeable, and effective, not obstructive or damaging. Make sure your teams work well together and you don't have individuals ruining it for everyone.

THEN, you can start handing out the branded t-shirts, the employee appreciation watches, and the pizza parties.

Ways to Use Branded Merchandise to Improve Employee Morale

We've talked about whether or not branded merchandise can improve morale and how it can help when it's a driver of positive impact, but we haven't given you tangible, usable advice yet. So, let's do that. How can you specifically use branded merchandise to boost employee morale?

Make the basics freely available.

One of the first tips we have is to make sure that the basics, the cheapest and least desirable of the branded items you have on offer, are essentially just made freely available for everyone. We're not talking about the apparel or the USB drives or the watches, here; we're talking about the stationery, the calendars, the pens and pencils, and so on. Anything that can be part of office productivity should be freely available to the people who might benefit from having it.

The truth is, a lot of these branded items are used as freely given promotional items anyway. Imagine that you have a swag bag with a notepad and a pen in it that you hand out for free to everyone who attends a career day where you have a booth. Now imagine that your employees are given that same swag bag as a special appreciation for their hard work. It falls a little flat, doesn't it?

The less value it has, the lower the stakes it should have for your employees to get it. A pen you'd buy in a pack of 100 for $2 isn't going to show a lot of appreciation, so don't act like it will.

Reward milestones with commensurate products.

This piggybacks on the previous point: the greater the level of appreciation you want to show, the more valuable, useful, and rare the item you give should be. A good example of this comes from the wedding anniversary industry. The first anniversary is the paper anniversary. Paper isn't all that valuable, and while celebrating your first year together is an important milestone, it's meant to be the least special and easiest to achieve of all of them.

Then consider the 25th anniversary, which is the silver anniversary. Silver is a precious metal, and a gift themed around pure silver is much more valuable and rare than something made of paper. Making it to 25 years of marriage is an important and, these days, relatively rare milestone.

Consider something similar with your employee appreciation, especially when you're rewarding specific employment anniversaries. When someone has been working for your company for ten years, award them something valuable and useful. Just remember that the scope of a marriage and the scope of employment tend to be quite different, especially these days, so don't hold out too long for the truly valuable branded items. There's a reason that 25-year loyalty gifts are often high-priced watches and other valuables.

Consider the uniform option.

Up above, one of the options we talked about was how having your staff in branded merchandise helps foster a sense of unity and community between them. This can be true – any uniform that identifies an in-group can make that in-group feel closer-knit than disparate and unbranded non-uniform apparel.

However, there are many cases where it's not the best option.

• If your employees are used to wearing their own business casual outfits, asking for a switch to uniforms can be a significant source of friction.
• If your employees aren't part of any public-facing team, wearing a uniform might feel self-serving and not valuable.
• Company-provided uniforms are often of lower quality, poor fit, and less comfortable than the individual's own clothing, especially if that individual has an unusual body type or needs for their clothing.

Truthfully, uniforms work well in certain situations, such as retail staff, company representatives at trade shows and other events, and similar public-facing purposes. For your office staff, your management, and other internal teams, it's not necessary and can be demoralizing.

Make an employee appreciation web store.

Another critical aspect of branded merchandise that we haven't mentioned yet is the purpose of the merchandise. In particular, you want the gifts you give to employees to be meaningful and useful to them. Giving your Florida-based employees a winter jacket isn't all that helpful, right?

There are three ways to get around this.

The first is to make sure every gift you give is generically useful. This is why t-shirts and tote bags are so popular; they're useful for pretty much everyone, so long as they wear clothes or ever need to carry things.

The second is to tailor your gifts to the individuals receiving them. This is a great option if you know those people, but if you have to make guesses – or worse, ask prying and intrusive questions – it can fall flat. You also run the risk of comparisons and jealousy from other employees whose own gifts don't seem to match up, value-wise.

The third option is to run an internal company catalog or store with branded items and gift points or whatever other currency to your employees to empower them to choose. It's fairer and more balanced but less personal.

There's no perfect option. However, what you can do is browse our store to see what kinds of ethically-produced and high-quality merchandise you can get for your employees. There's something here for everyone and at every level, so check it out!