The Frequency

We temporarily removed sales targets for 30 days during one of our toughest quarters, and it had a bigger impact on morale than any bonus ever did.

Revenue was tight and pressure was building. I could see the team becoming cautious, defensive, and transactional in conversations. Instead of doubling down on targets, we paused them. For one month, the only KPI was meaningful client conversations. No quotas. No leaderboard. Just rebuild trust and relationships.

What happened was unexpected. Call quality improved. Follow-ups became thoughtful instead of rushed. By the end of the 30 days, pipeline value had grown organically, and the following quarter closed 22 percent stronger than projected. But more importantly, the tension in the room disappeared.

The lesson was simple: when pressure is high, adding more pressure rarely works. Sometimes removing the scoreboard restores confidence, and confident teams perform better than stressed ones.

At what point does pushing through a tough quarter stop being resilience and start being denial that your team is exhausted?

We hit that point about a year ago. 3 people on the team had been carrying most of the weight for about 6 weeks straight. The usual move would have been a team dinner or some kind of recognition in a meeting. Instead I told all 3 to take the next week off. Full week, no check-ins, no Slack.

The timing felt wrong. We were still in the middle of it. But that was sort of the point. Waiting until after the crunch to reward people means they’ve already burned out by the time you acknowledge it.

What surprised me was the rest of the team. They picked up more than I expected without being asked. I think there was something about seeing that rest was actually allowed that changed how people felt about the work itself.

Performance didn’t dip that week. Morale came back faster than any team activity I’ve tried before or since. I don’t have a framework for why it worked. Probably just that people want to know you noticed.

I temporarily flipped the recognition structure during a tough stretch. Instead of management recognizing employees, I asked my team members to recognize each other. Each week, anyone could call out a coworker for something specific they did to help the team or a customer, and we shared those stories at our morning meeting.

Recognition felt more genuine because it came from peers who understood the grind. It also surfaced a lot of quiet wins that normally go unnoticed, like someone staying late to help another tech or calmly handling a difficult homeowner. Team spirit improved because people felt seen by the people who mattered most to them. Performance followed in subtle but real ways, with better teamwork, fewer callbacks, and a noticeable lift in attitude even when the workload stayed heavy.

The most unconventional thing I did was canceling our sprint planning and replacing it with an unstructured two hour session I called “build something stupid.” No roadmap, no Jira tickets, just whatever people actually wanted to try.

This was during a stretch where the team was burned out from executing a painful migration that had dragged on for months. Morale was low not because people did not care, but because they had been in execution mode for so long they had forgotten why they liked building things in the first place.

What happened in that two hour session was remarkable. One person built a Slack bot that generated random compliments on demand. Another person quietly rebuilt an internal reporting tool they had been annoyed by for two years. The session had no deliverables and no follow up.

The impact on spirit was immediate and disproportionate to the time invested. People came into the next sprint with noticeably more energy. The reason, I think, is that the session reminded everyone that they are actually creative people who enjoy problem solving, and that enjoyment is usually buried under the weight of structured work.

On performance, the productivity gains were real but indirect. The sprint after that session had fewer blocked tickets and more proactive communication than we had seen in weeks. When people feel like agents rather than executors, they bring that ownership into everything including the work that actually ships.

We launched “The Anti-Demo” in response to a rapid, intense shift in focus at the time that our team was redlining. Instead of the typical showcase of polished functionality, our most experienced engineers presented their largest technical dead-end and logical errors from the preceding week. Although it seems counterproductive to celebrate failures when the morale is low, it immediately shifted the cycle of defensive behaviours (posturing) and perfection anxiety that often paralyze distributed teams.

This shift turned vulnerability into a symbol of seniority and created a psychological safety net that allowed everyone to stop concealing obstacles. Performance also improved because the team no longer had to expend mental effort managing their reputations; we experienced a significant increase in velocity with developers no longer attempting to fix bugs in isolation. Our internal observations corroborate research like Google’s Project Aristotle which concluded that psychological safety (the freedom to take risks without feeling insecure) is the most important factor to creating high-performance teams.

Maintaining the morale of your team during crisis situations is not about being positive at all costs; it is about removing the burden of struggle. When you normalize the chaos inherent in the process of shipping software and deliver quality products, you eliminate the isolation that typically causes remote teams to suffer from burnout. You remind yourself that it is not about being perfect; it is about having enough resilience to be able to continue shipping products.

During a challenging quarter, I introduced a “mission week” initiative where every team member proposed one efficiency improvement tied to revenue or retention. We implemented the strongest ideas immediately. That sense of ownership shifted energy fast. Team morale improved because people felt heard and impactful. Within six weeks, operational costs decreased by 12 percent and performance targets stabilized.

It might go against the grain for most, but during tough periods I tend to stay away from morale boosting events and instead one-to-one my employees on the biggest things that are slowing them down or causing them stress. I like to commit a certain amount of time afterwards to removing these blockers and smoothing things out to hopefully give them a break while adjusting their workflow for the future.

I don’t put much stock in motivational speeches or things like that, as I think that a company running smoothly without asking for too much is the best way to maintain morale. Practical fixes are far more potent, in my experience, so sorting out permissions issues, unclear processes and unnecessary approvals can go a lot further than you’d think. The impact of these periods is usually immediate, as it breathes some fresh air into the team.

During a challenging quarter, I invited team members to share lessons learned instead of focusing on targets missed. This reframed setbacks as shared growth. Morale improved because people felt heard and valued.

One simple thing I do to try to boost morale during tough times is to take employees out to lunch and find out more about how they are doing and how they are feeling. I spend little time talking and more time listening. I ask them if they have any ideas for making things easier at work and if there are things that I might be able to do to assist. I want to make the employees feel heard and I want them to understand that they are a valued member of a team. I often find that when people feel like their concerns are being taken seriously and that their contributions are truly valued, it tends to boost both individual and team morale.