Employee Morale: What It Is and How to Improve It
Employee morale is the shared outlook a team holds toward its work. What causes it to drop, how to read the signs early, and how to measure it properly.
Nearly every article on this subject follows the same path: a definition, reasons morale matters, warning signs, then twenty ideas involving pizza, recognition software, and an offsite. That advice is not wrong, but it assumes a large organization with someone paid to run programs. This one shows how to read and fix morale in a business that has neither.
Here is the arithmetic that changes the whole problem. On a team of eight, one person is 12.5 percent of your average. On a team of twenty, one person is 5 percent. Every published morale framework assumes an average stable enough to act on, and at your size the average is mostly a report on whoever is having the worst month. The number that enterprise HR treats as a signal is, for you, almost entirely noise.
That is not a reason to ignore morale. It is a reason to measure it completely differently and to fix it at the level of individual people rather than programs, which is something you can actually do in a small business and no HR department can do across an enterprise.
This guide covers what morale is and how it differs from the three things it gets confused with, the behavioral signs that appear before anyone says anything, the five causes that account for most of it, the uncomfortable new data on where the problem usually originates, how to measure it when your entire team fits around one table, and how to improve it. I build the people tooling behind this at FirstHR.
What Employee Morale Is
Employee morale is the overall attitude, confidence, and outlook that people hold toward their work and their employer. It sits at the group level because, unlike individual satisfaction, it transmits between people.
Team morale, staff morale, company morale, and work morale all name the same thing at different zoom levels. Team morale is one group of people who work together daily, company morale is the whole business, and work morale is how a single person describes their own outlook. Nothing below changes with the label.
Three properties make it behave differently from the other people metrics you might track.
It is contagious. A person who arrives cheerful and leaves flat has usually not changed their opinion of their job. They have caught the mood of the room. On a small team this transmission is close to instant because there is no organizational distance for it to travel through.
It is fast. Morale can shift materially within a single week following an event: a client loss, a resignation, an announcement that landed badly. Engagement and satisfaction do not move on that timescale, which is precisely why morale is useful as a leading indicator and misleading as a lagging one.
It is about the situation rather than the work. Someone can love what they do and have low morale about where they are doing it. That distinction matters when you are choosing a response, because the interventions that fix an unloved job are different from the ones that fix a demoralized team doing work they otherwise enjoy.
What High and Low Morale Look Like
High morale is quieter than the word suggests. It shows up as people offering before they are asked, saying the awkward thing early, and describing the company as "we." The moments below are where the difference is easiest to see, and none of them requires anyone to fill in a form.
| The moment | High morale looks like | Low morale looks like |
|---|---|---|
| A mistake surfaces | The person who made it says so first, and the conversation is about the fix inside a minute | Someone else finds it later, and the first few sentences are about whose fault it was |
| A project needs an owner | Two people offer before you have finished describing it | The room waits, and it lands with whoever is least able to say no |
| A meeting ends | People stay on for a minute because they want to keep talking about the thing | The call empties the second you stop speaking |
| A new hire arrives | Three people offer to walk them through their part without being asked | The new person gets exactly what was assigned to somebody and nothing beyond it |
| A friend asks where they work | They describe what the company does before they describe their own job | They name the role and change the subject |
| A decision goes against them | They argue it in the room and then run it properly anyway | They agree in the room and work around it afterward |
Reading the right-hand column as a mood is the usual mistake. It is a set of decisions people have made about what is worth the effort here, which is why the earlier you catch it the cheaper it is. The full diagnostic on low morale rarely rests on one moment from this table. It rests on two or three of them repeating over several weeks, which is what separates a bad week from a settled decision.
Morale vs Engagement
Morale is how people feel about the situation, engagement is how invested they are in the work, satisfaction is whether they think the deal is fair, and wellbeing is how they are actually doing. The four are correlated, frequently used interchangeably, and respond to completely different interventions.
| Morale | Engagement | Satisfaction | Wellbeing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Feeling about the situation | Investment in the work | Fairness of the arrangement | How the person is doing |
| Level it lives at | The group | The individual | The individual | The individual |
| How fast it moves | Days to weeks | Months | Quarters | Slowly, and from outside work too |
| Contagious | Highly | Somewhat | Barely | Somewhat |
| Best early signal | Yes | No | No | No |
| Fixed by | Clarity, fairness, addressing what everyone sees | Meaningful work, recognition, development | Pay, workload, terms | Support, flexibility, reduced load |
| Fails as | A flat room and quiet meetings | Effort at the minimum acceptable level | Departure for a better offer | Burnout and absence |
The practical test when something feels wrong: ask whether the person still cares about the work. If they do, and they are still flat, you have a morale problem and the cause is environmental. If they no longer care about the work itself, that is an engagement problem and no amount of improving the atmosphere will reach it.
Mixing up morale and engagement is how a team ends up with an offsite when what it needed was a reallocation of who works on what.
The same distinction separates morale from wellbeing, which reaches into things you did not cause. A team can have entirely healthy morale while one person is quietly struggling with something outside work, and treating that as a morale issue is both ineffective and intrusive.
Job Dissatisfaction and Where It Sits
Job dissatisfaction is the individual version of this problem: one person concluding that the arrangement is no longer worth what it asks of them. It is slower than morale, personal rather than contagious, and it usually names something concrete: pay, hours, the commute, a title that stopped matching the work, a promotion that went elsewhere.
Because dissatisfaction is personal, it also needs a personal response. A dissatisfied person on a team with healthy morale needs a conversation about their specific terms, and the fixes for satisfaction are largely transactional. Dissatisfaction that goes unnamed usually exits rather than escalates, which is why it shows up as withdrawal first and a resignation second.
Why It Matters
The business case is stronger than the soft framing suggests, and it rests on two bodies of evidence rather than on assertion.
The first is correlational and enormous. According to Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis (11th edition, 2024), which pools 183,806 business units across 53 industries and 90 countries, units in the top quartile on engagement outperform bottom quartile units by roughly 23 percent in profitability and 18 percent in productivity measured by sales, with 78 percent lower absenteeism. Those are differences between real operating units rather than modeled projections.
The second body of evidence is experimental and therefore causal, which matters because the correlational case always invites the objection that successful companies simply have happier staff. Economists at the University of Warwick studied 713 participants across four experiments, three of which raised the mood of randomly selected subjects and left the rest alone.
The Warwick team found that the treated group was approximately 12 percent more productive in a paid piece rate task (Journal of Labor Economics, 2015). Accuracy did not pay for the extra output: in the second experiment the share of attempted sums that came out correct was higher in the treated group, 0.88 against 0.83. The direction of causation ran from mood to performance, not the other way around.
Both of those findings describe leading conditions. The lagging version shows up in your own numbers as people leaving, and the national picture for voluntary quits is published monthly in the federal job openings and labor turnover data.
The federal quits series is worth watching for context rather than as a target, because a quits rate is a market signal as much as a morale one. Reading your own departures against it stops you concluding that a normal year is a crisis or that a bad year is just the economy.
For a small business the honest translation is not a percentage. One demoralized person represents a meaningful share of your capacity, and you will feel the effect in delivery before you see it in any number you track.
Morale problems also resolve into turnover costs that dwarf anything you would have spent preventing them. One talent-management consultant quoted by SHRM (2022) puts the total cost to hire at three to four times the position's salary once hard and soft costs are counted.
Nick Anisimov, FirstHR founderWhy Small Teams Differ
Almost all morale guidance assumes a group large enough that individual variation cancels out. On a small team it does not, and that single fact invalidates most of the standard playbook.
| Team size | Weight of one person | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A team of 8 | One person equals 12.5 percent of your average | Any survey average you compute is really a report on eight opinions. If one person is having a genuinely bad quarter, your team score moves by more than most enterprise morale interventions ever achieve. The number is not measuring the team. It is measuring that person. |
| A team of 20 | One person equals 5 percent | Still enough that two unhappy people can turn a healthy team into a mediocre score. This is the size where founders start believing the number and acting on it, and where acting on the average first does the most damage. |
| A team of 200 | One person equals 0.5 percent | Here the average is stable, individual noise cancels out, and the standard advice written for HR departments starts to work as intended. Almost all published morale guidance assumes you are somewhere near here. |
Three consequences follow, and they are the reason the rest of this guide looks different from what you will read elsewhere.
The average is the wrong statistic. A team score of 3.4 out of 5 can mean everyone is mildly lukewarm or it can mean nine people are thriving and three are done. Those are different situations with opposite responses, and the mean hides which one you are in. Read the spread, and on a small team you can simply read the individuals.
Anonymity is a promise you cannot keep. On a team of twelve, any question that produces an interesting answer also produces a guessable author, and people know it. This does not make surveys useless. It makes them useless for anything a person would be reluctant to say aloud. Ask surveys the things people will answer honestly and get the sensitive material through conversation.
Programs are the wrong instrument. A recognition program exists so that recognition happens at scale without a leader in the room. You have a leader in the room. The overhead of the program buys you nothing you cannot do directly, and the direct version lands better because everyone can tell the difference between a system and a person noticing.
Signs of Low Morale
The reliable early signs are behavioral rather than verbal, because morale drops well before anyone decides it is worth mentioning. Complaints are actually a late signal and, counterintuitively, a healthier one than silence.
| Signal | What it usually means | How early it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Questions stop in group meetings | People have concluded that raising things is not worth the friction | Very early, often first |
| Nobody volunteers for unassigned work | Discretionary effort has been withdrawn while the job is still being done | Very early |
| Internal referrals dry up | People have stopped recommending the place, which precedes leaving it | Early and highly reliable |
| Communication becomes formal and written | People are creating a record because they no longer assume good faith | Early, and often misread as professionalism |
| Unplanned absences cluster | Avoidance of specific days, meetings, or people | Middle |
| Sarcasm and in-jokes about the company | Distance being established, half affectionate and half not | Middle |
| Quality slips on work nobody checks | Effort now tracks visibility rather than standards | Middle to late |
| A resignation that surprises you | The decision was made months before the conversation | Late, and expensive |
The referral signal deserves particular attention because it is nearly impossible to fake and costs nothing to track. People recommend a workplace to friends when they feel good about it, and they stop doing so well before they update their own plans. If you were getting candidate introductions from your team and they have quietly stopped, something changed, and it changed a while ago.
Two signals are commonly misread. Reduced complaining is usually deterioration rather than improvement, because engaged people complain and resigned people do not. And a sudden burst of politeness in a team that was previously blunt with each other is often the sound of psychological safety leaving the room rather than of manners arriving.
What Causes It
Five causes account for the large majority of morale problems in small businesses, and four of the five cost nothing to fix. Notably, pay level is not on the list. Pay fairness is.
The workload fairness problem is the one I would check first in any small business. It appears when a small number of reliable people quietly absorb everything that has no owner, which is the natural equilibrium of a growing company with no process.
Uneven workload stays invisible from above because the people carrying it are, by selection, the ones who do not complain. It is also the cause most likely to end in a resignation that arrives without warning. A basic look at who is carrying what usually finds it in an afternoon.
The unaddressed behavior problem is the second I would check, and the hardest to hear. Every team knows who the problem is. When nothing happens, people do not conclude that leadership is being patient. They conclude that the stated standards are decorative. That reading damages morale across everyone who is meeting the standard, which is almost always most of the team.
The Manager Problem
The most useful recent finding in this field is uncomfortable for anyone running a small business: the decline in engagement is being driven by managers rather than by their teams, and in your company the manager is you.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace puts manager engagement at 22 percent in 2025, down nine points from 31 percent in 2022, with five of those points lost between 2024 and 2025 alone. Gallup reads that decline plainly: managers used to enjoy an engagement premium, and are now increasingly only as engaged as the people they lead.
This matters more than a statistic normally would, because Gallup's longstanding finding is that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in team engagement scores across business units. If the person setting the tone is depleted, the effect does not stay contained. It propagates to everyone in range, and on a team of twelve everyone is in range.
| What the team experiences | What is often actually happening | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| Priorities change without explanation | The founder is reacting to pressure they have not shared | Share the pressure, not just the resulting decision |
| Feedback becomes rare and then sudden | Management work is being deferred behind delivery work | Protect a fixed slot for it, however small |
| Recognition stops | Attention is fully consumed by whatever is on fire | A standing weekly prompt to name one thing that went well |
| The tone in meetings goes flat | The person setting the tone has nothing left to set it with | Address the depletion directly rather than performing energy |
| Decisions get slower | Too many decisions route through one person | Push a category of decision down and say so publicly |
The implication is that a founder cannot fix team morale from a position of depletion, and that most of what gets prescribed for morale asks the depleted person to run yet another initiative.
The higher-return move is usually to reduce the number of things routing through you, which improves the team's experience and your own at the same time. Regular one-on-one meetings are the cheapest version of this, because they replace a dozen ad hoc interruptions with one predictable conversation.
None of this is an argument for founder heroics. It is the opposite. If burnout at the top is the largest single input into team morale, then protecting that person is a team intervention rather than a personal indulgence.
How to Measure It
Use three inputs rather than one instrument: behavioral signals, a short quarterly pulse, and one-on-one conversations. Weight them toward behavior and conversation and away from survey averages that a team your size cannot produce reliably.
Those five steps need somewhere to live, and memory is not it. The workbook below holds all three inputs in one file: the monthly signals, the conversations, and the question set.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Month | Unplanned absences | Voluntary departures | Internal referrals made | Late or missed check-ins | Volunteering for new work | Questions asked in all-hands | Notable events this month | Read of the room |
| 2 | Example: January | 3 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 6 | Lost the Acme account | Flat |
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The first sheet is the monthly behavioral record, with a column for what actually happened that month. Most trackers omit that column, and it is the one that makes the rest interpretable.
The second sheet is a structured one-on-one log with the same fields every time, including a column for what you owe the person afterward, because an unfulfilled commitment from a check-in does more damage than not having asked. The third is a short question set with a note on what each question is actually detecting and how often to ask it.
If you do run a pulse, keep it short and keep it rare. Long or frequent instruments produce fatigue and then produce agreeable answers, which is worse than no data because it looks like data.
The general caution about survey mechanics applies doubly at small scale. There, a poorly worded question produces something worse than a bad data point: an answer that three people can trace back to whoever gave it honestly.
Dwight SchruteSales3 people
Darryl PhilbinWarehouse1 person
Kelly KapoorCustomer Service1 personHow to Improve It
To improve morale, work the causes in order of cost and reach. The cheapest actions come first, because they also happen to be the most effective ones.
| Action | What it costs | What it fixes | How fast it lands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restate priorities in writing, monthly | An hour | The clarity cause, the most common one | Within a week |
| Put an end date on any intense period | Nothing but commitment | Open-ended overload | Immediately |
| Rebalance who carries the unowned work | A difficult conversation | The fairness cause, workload version | Within a month |
| Address the behavior everyone has noticed | The hardest conversation you have | The standards problem, and it fixes it for everyone | Immediately, and visibly |
| Specific, timely recognition | Nothing | Recognition drought | Same day |
| Give one person a decision they did not have | Some control | Autonomy, and it reduces your own load | Within weeks |
| Review pay against the market | Real money | The fairness cause, pay version | One cycle |
| Social events and perks | Money and time | Atmosphere, once the causes are handled | Briefly, unless the rest is done |
The ordering is the point. The last row is where most published advice starts, and it is the only row that reliably fails when the rows above it are unresolved. A team carrying an unaddressed fairness problem does not see a catered lunch as generosity. It sees evidence that leadership has misdiagnosed the situation or is hoping to buy past it.
Recognition is worth separating out because it is free, fast, and routinely done badly. Generic praise to a group registers as noise. Specific praise for a specific thing, delivered close to when it happened and in front of people whose opinion the person values, is the highest return action available to a small business.
Where a genuine budget exists, spend it on the fairness causes rather than the atmosphere ones. Pay equity within your own team matters more than your position against the market, because internal comparisons are the ones people actually make.
Morale Boosters That Actually Land
A morale booster works when it removes friction or makes good work visible, and fails when it stands in for a conversation somebody is avoiding. That is the whole difference between the ideas below and the pizza everyone politely eats before returning to the same unresolved problem.
Four that cost nothing on a small team: end the week with a short note naming what shipped and who did it; hand one person a decision you used to make and say so publicly; protect one block a week with no meetings in it; and let people present their own work at the all hands rather than having a lead summarize it for them.
Fun is not the enemy here. A team lunch, a games afternoon, or any of the usual team building activities boosts morale when the room is already in reasonable shape and the point is simply time together. Run the same event in the week after a difficult decision and people read it as a distraction.
What does not work on its own: a one-off event, a perk announced in the same week as a difficult decision, or recognition that arrives on a schedule rather than close to the thing it is for. None of those is a booster by itself, and mistaking them for boosters is how a team ends up cheerful for an afternoon and flat by Wednesday.
The One Person Problem
On a small team one person can move overall morale more than any program you could run, in either direction. Handling that requires separating two situations that look similar and need opposite responses.
| Someone who is struggling | Someone whose behavior is the problem | |
|---|---|---|
| What you see | Withdrawal, lower output, less presence | Contempt, undermining, consistently poor conduct toward others |
| Effect on others | Concern, and some extra load | Everyone recalibrates what the real standard is |
| What it usually is | Overload, something outside work, or wrong role | A pattern, and usually a known one |
| Right response | Support, reduced load, and a conversation about fit | A direct conversation about the behavior, with consequences named |
| Cost of waiting | Moderate, and mostly to that person | High, compounding, and paid by everyone else |
| What not to do | Treat it as a discipline issue | Treat it as a wellbeing issue and wait for it to resolve |
The right-hand column is where small businesses lose the most morale, because the conversation is unpleasant and the person is often productive. The calculation people make is that removing them costs a good contributor. The calculation they miss is that every week of inaction is a lesson delivered to everyone else about what conduct actually costs here.
The positive version is equally real and less discussed. One person who consistently raises the tone, notices other people's work, and treats problems as solvable has an outsized effect on a small team. That person is worth recognizing explicitly and worth protecting when you allocate the unpleasant work, because people like this are usually also the ones absorbing it.
Common Mistakes
The failures repeat, and most of them come from applying large-company methods to a team where they cannot work.
| Mistake | Why it happens | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Treating a survey average as the finding | It produces a single number that looks like a metric | Read the distribution, and on a small team read the people |
| Promising anonymity you cannot deliver | It is the standard script for running a survey | Say plainly that answers are not fully anonymous at this size, and ask accordingly |
| Reaching for perks first | They are visible, fast, and require no difficult conversation | Work the five causes first, then spend on atmosphere |
| Asking and then not acting | The survey felt like the action | Report back what you heard and name one thing you will change, even if small |
| Confusing quiet with content | Nothing appears to be wrong | Treat a drop in questions and volunteering as the reading it is |
| Benchmarking against published figures | Benchmarks feel objective | Compare against your own previous quarter only |
| Running a morale initiative while depleted | It feels like the responsible thing | Reduce what routes through you first, then address the team |
| Treating a conduct problem as a morale problem | It avoids the hard conversation | Name the behavior, name the consequence, and follow through |
The fourth row is the most damaging of the eight. Asking people how they are and then visibly doing nothing is worse than never asking, because it converts a reversible morale dip into a settled belief that raising things is pointless. If you are not in a position to act on what you hear, delay the asking rather than the acting.
A structured action plan after any pulse is not optional, and for a small business it can be a single paragraph naming one change.
None of this requires an HR function, a platform, or a budget. It requires knowing what to watch, checking it on a schedule you actually keep, and being willing to have the two or three conversations that everyone can already see are needed. That is the whole of it, and it is genuinely easier at your size than at any other.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is employee morale?
Employee morale is the general mood, confidence, and outlook that people bring to their jobs and to the company they work for, whether you look at one person or a whole team. Think of it as a feeling rather than a verdict: it shifts fast, passes from one colleague to the next, and frequently changes before anybody says so out loud. That contagious quality is why morale is normally discussed for a team or a business, while job satisfaction is judged one person at a time. When morale is high, you see people taking on work nobody assigned them, flagging problems while they are still small, and referring to the company in the first person plural.
What is the difference between morale and engagement?
Morale describes how people feel about where things stand right now, while engagement describes how much of themselves they put into the work. The two usually rise and fall together, yet they are separate things that break down in separate ways. A badly received announcement can flatten a whole team's mood within a week and leave engagement untouched, and one person can stay deeply engaged in work they believe in while the mood around them falls apart. Because morale reacts first and engagement holds on longer, morale gives you the earlier warning and engagement gives you the steadier long term measure of how invested your people are.
What are the signs of low employee morale?
The signs of low employee morale are mostly things people do, or stop doing, and they appear well before anyone voices a concern. Group meetings go quiet because nobody asks questions anymore. People stop offering to take on work that nobody assigned them. Unplanned absences start bunching up around certain days. Referrals from your own staff dry up, often the clearest signal of all, since people stop recommending an employer before they decide to leave it. Messages turn formal as conversations get replaced by written records. And complaining fades instead of growing, because people who have given up stop objecting and simply pull back.
What causes low morale in the workplace?
Most low morale traces back to one of five causes. People are unsure what is expected of them, one important working relationship has gone wrong, pay or workload is shared out unfairly, a stretch of heavy overload has no end date in sight, or the team has watched behavior go unchallenged that should have been dealt with. In a small business, the two that are hardest to spot are uneven workload and the missing end date, because whoever is carrying the extra weight is usually the last person to bring it up. Name the cause before you respond, because each one needs a different fix: unclear expectations need priorities restated in writing, a fairness problem needs pay or work rebalanced, open-ended overload needs a finish line, and unaddressed behavior needs a direct conversation. A perk applied before the cause is found tends to read as an attempt to buy past the problem.
How do you measure employee morale in a small team?
Mostly without leaning on a survey average. On a small team, one or two individuals swing the average, and the anonymity a survey promises does not hold up because answers can be traced. Combine three sources instead. Each month, log behavioral signals such as unplanned absences, voluntary departures, internal referrals, and who puts their hand up for new work. Each quarter, run a pulse of five or six questions and look at how the answers are spread rather than at the mean. Alongside both, hold structured one-on-one conversations, which on a team of fifteen tell you more than any instrument can. Ask the same few questions each time and write the answers down, so you can see change rather than rely on memory.
How can a small business improve employee morale without a budget?
Start with the free actions, because they also pay back the most. Put the team's priorities in writing so everyone can judge whether they are on track. Set an end date for any stretch of unusually intense work so it stops feeling permanent. Deal with the fairness problem people can see, which is more often about workload than pay. Have the conversation about the behavior the whole team has noticed but nobody has raised. Praise people for specific things soon after they happen, which costs nothing at all. Leave perks until the end, since a perk layered over an unresolved problem looks like an attempt to buy silence.
Does employee morale actually affect business results?
Yes, and the effect can be measured. When Gallup's meta-analysis set business units in the top quartile for engagement against those in the bottom quartile, the top group led on profitability by about 23 percent and on sales productivity by 18 percent, and its absenteeism was 78 percent lower. A separate randomized study in the Journal of Labor Economics lifted some participants' mood under controlled conditions and found them approximately 12 percent more productive, with no loss of accuracy as their output climbed. That experiment shows mood driving output, but inside a real business the link also runs the other way, because good results lift morale too.
How often should you check employee morale?
Continuously through behavior, and formally about once a quarter. Behavioral signals are free and available every week if you know what to watch. A formal pulse more often than quarterly produces survey fatigue and stops generating honest answers, especially on a team small enough that people can guess who said what. The one exception is a period of visible upheaval, such as a layoff, a lost major client, or a leadership change, when a short check within two weeks catches problems while they are still cheap to fix. Keep the formal pulse short, five or six questions with one open text field, and read how the answers are spread rather than the average. Between pulses, a one-line monthly note of what happened, such as a lost client, a departure, or a launch, makes each reading much easier to interpret.
Can one person really damage a whole team's morale?
On a small team, yes, and disproportionately. Morale is contagious and a team of twelve has nowhere to absorb a persistently negative presence. The important distinction is between a person who is unhappy and a person whose behavior is the problem. Someone struggling needs support and usually recovers. Someone whose conduct is corrosive is teaching the rest of the team what your real standards are every day it goes unaddressed, and the cost of that lesson compounds faster than the cost of the difficult conversation. Separate the two quickly. A struggling person needs support, a lighter load, and a conversation about fit. A person whose conduct is the problem needs a direct conversation about the specific behavior, with the consequence named and then followed through. The positive version is real too: one person who notices other people's work and treats problems as solvable lifts a small team, and deserves explicit recognition.
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