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6 Tips for motivating employees
1) Keep ‘Rewards’ to a minimum:
Understand what you are doing with them when you use them. If your ‘rewards’ pit people against one another any motivation gained can be quickly lost.
Enable people to gain skills, knowledge and mastery of something as a way to reward them. Send them on a course, train them and help them grow as an employee and they will feel more valued.
2) Emotionally engage them in the business:
Social and emotional needs can be engaged by sharing information and inviting involvement.
Consider where you can bring your employees in to the picture so they do more than their job. Allow them to make a contribution to the challenges of the organization.
3) Focus on the present and then future:
Things like performance reviews often focus on the past.
Provide opportunities to focus on the future as much as possible because the future has the potential. Let employees see their own, their teams/departments and the organizations growth and future opportunities.
4) Listen and Talk:
It is a combination of listening and letting employees know you are listening and talking so they can hear what you have to say.
Employees will be more motivated generally, once their bills are paid, by a leader who they know will listen and hear what they have to say.
This does not mean that your employees get to make the final decisions but by asking their suggestions you provide them with the opportunity to help shape the business and this ownership can make them more likely to care, which engages their actions to work towards a goal of building your business.
5) Be Flexible:
By definition Individuals are not alike and what motivates them changes.
Re-evaluate your messages, actions and options regularly to identify what motivating factors may be more engaging to your employees. A sustainability project, the opportunity to learn and travel work well for some employees and not for others.
Re=evaluate your strategies and be prepared to change.
Treating your employees like you value them is an effective motivator but you often need to send the message multiple times and in multiple ways.
If you keep in mind understanding first and motivating second you are more likely to find a ‘motivation’ that works.
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