Keep Employees From Burning OutThese first-hand tips can keep up both morale and productivity.

Great employees are invaluable to any company. Their motivation reflects well on the organization and inspires other employees to do their best. But the 9-to-5 grind can get tiresome, and keeping your key players at the top of their game is more important than ever.

By finding ways to encourage, listen to and connect with your team, you're creating a positive work environment – and when your employees feel like they're cared for, they're much more likely to deliver consistently excellent results.

Two-way communication.You probably have an open-door policy and know its merits, but establishing consistent two-way communication helps your employees manage their expectations and your own. Once a month, the corporate office gets together to discuss the company's values, vision and contributions. This idea of having a message and consistently delivering it makes for clear and productive communication between you and your team.

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Keep score.True professionals thrive off of praise and constructive criticism equally – after all, both are essential for growth. At City Wide, each employee fills out a scorecard with key performance indicators. We operate under the philosophy that employees want to know what is expected of them and how well they're doing. The scorecards allow every person to understand how their work and actions contribute to the success of the organization.

We also make sure to recognize our exceptional team members. Every month, we give out different in-house awards for individual contributions, and each director gets the opportunity to stand up at a company-wide meeting and talk about the contributions of his or her team.

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Get out of the office.It's been proven thatleaving your desk for a short periodof time – even for a lunch break – increases productivity and creativity. Your team works hard, and they deserve to play hard, too. At City Wide, we take part in community outreach, host blood drives, do 5K races, scavenger hunts and cook-offs. It's truly a family – we support one another and we grow and learn together.

We believe that when our employees are happy, they produce great results. We all want to surround ourselves with positive people because we spend a lot of time together. As soon as someone visits our office or joins our team, our energy is apparent – it's a great place to be.

Of course, balance is key. It's important not to go overboard – straddling the line of accountability is essential. Office culture is defined by your values – it's important that any company identifies its values, articulates them repeatedly and helps instill them into people who create your office culture.