How you can motivate your employees:
By Cham Posted Date: August 15, 2017
Regardless of whether you are a business owner, project manager or just overseeing a department or team within an organization, your goal should always be growth. Growth in all its forms requires you to be prepared both mentally and physically. It’s important to have the right tools to help you with the grander scheme and achieving your goals as a leader.
Within a business the employees are your team and they are the most important (and deciding) factor towards your business growth. The performance of your employees will correlate to the performance of your business in the long run.
It is very important as a leader within your business to know exactly what needs to be done to keep your employees focused on achieving the common goal of creating value and ultimately business growth. The secret to keeping your employees motivated is knowing about them individually and motivate them according to what they respond to best as individuals.
It is vital to spend time on building an ecosystem that employees find engaging as well as improving their overall work experience and culture as this translates to their performance and satisfaction.
Discussed below are some tips on how you can motivate your employees:
- Develop an environment that is focused on the best performers – Anything you do towards improving the working conditions of your team must be done with the top performers in mind. It’s important that you understand the best way to motivate the most talented people within your team, as those are the employees that need to be satisfied with their work environment
- Use a simple tool for employee recognition – Employees tend to respond better to recognition of their good work over other types of rewards (such as gifts). It can sometimes be difficult as a manager to deliver positive feedback or recognition to an employee every time they perform well. As a result it’s useful to have a tool or system within your organisation that you use to recognise the good work an employee does (similar to employee of the month). The ideal tool will give you a rating or grading system that can be used to motivate them based on performance and quality of work
- Encourage creativity – The majority of innovation comes from the people who are designing your products and services as well as the ones who interact directly with customers. Be flexible and allow room for their input and creativity, fostering such a mindset in your team will result in innovative results.
- Invest in skills development and learning – Employees that get the opportunity to grow their skills and learn more while on the job will take more pride in their work and the organisation they work for. It’s essential that you encourage your employees to develop and learn new skills and give them the opportunity to apply what they learn within the work place. This not only improves their work and your business capabilities but also increases loyalty and retention.
- Avoid micromanaging – the issue with micromanaging is that your employees will become too dependent on you and will not learn and produce better outcomes for themselves. Give them direction and assistance when required but do not manage each and everything. It’s good to sometimes give your employees the freedom to do things in their own way, who knows they may surprise you!