Top Tips to Keep Your Employees Motivated
They say a business is only as good as its employees and this is largely true. If you don’t have hard-working, committed, satisfied employees then productivity will inevitably drop and this will affect every aspect of your business. This is why it is important to ensure you find ways of keeping your employees motivated and happy in the workplace.
Without proper motivation and a good working environment, staff morale can drop through the floor. This in turn can lead to everything from mental and physical illness through to inability to focus, and undesirable workplace atmosphere, and high staff turnover. By making sure you implement simple techniques to keep staff motivated you can help to ensure that your business does not start experiencing problems such as these.
Key tips to help
Businesses can benefit hugely by taking the time to develop a strategy that will boost motivation amongst employees. There are various different tactics that you can use in order to do this. Some of the tips that you can apply to your strategy include:
Communicate effectively: Lack of communication between managers and employees can cause resentment and a variety of problems. This will do nothing to make employees want to work towards a common goal. You should make sure that as a manager or business owner, you engage with employees effectively and remember that they are essentially powering your business. Speak to them face to face rather than just via email and don’t just limit communication to work related issues – use it as an opportunity to chat with them and make them feel at ease. A recent post on cnbc news live demonstrated the importance of motivating employees to help improve staff engagement and productivity – this is a key way of doing this.
Lead by example: You cannot realistically expect your employees to work in a certain way while you do something completely different. You, therefore, need to lead by example in order to encourage your staff. For example, demonstrate excitement and dedication in terms of company goals or events and this will filter through to your employees.
Get them involved: Simply handing out orders and tasks to employees will achieve very little other than making them feel under-valued. Instead, get them involved in key matters such as marketing strategies, setting goals, health and safety issues, and other important business activities. This will make them feel that their opinions count and could help to make major improvements. Get opinions from individual employees during monthly reviews and meetings and ask about their suggestions on how improvement could be made.
Provide opportunities: Most employees won’t want to be stuck in the same job forever but if you have a good, hard-working team you don’t want to risk losing them. Therefore, provide opportunities for training and advancement. This will help to boost their motivation levels and make them feel valued. It can also help to reduce staff turnover and the risk of losing valued staff members.
Don’t set unrealistic goals and targets: While you need to be clear about goals and targets that you want your employees to work towards, you must make sure you are not unrealistic about them. Setting goals that are hugely difficult or impossible to achieve can make life very stressful for your staff and this is can result in them becoming quickly de-motivated. Instead, set goals and targets that can be achieved.
Be open with your staff: It is important to be as open and transparent as possible with your staff. Employees can become suspicious and worried when there are things going on behind the scenes and they have no idea what it’s all about. You should try and keep staff informed at all times and wherever possible keep your employees in the loop about what’s going in within the team and with the business as a whole.
Get to know individuals: In order to get the most out of each employee as an individual, it is important to get to know them. Speak to them on a personal level rather than as a team and get to know what makes each of your employees tick.
Set up awards and recognition schemes: Another great way to help motivate your staff is by setting up rewards and recognition schemes. You can base these on performances, meeting targets, or even getting the most compliments from customers. You can give awards for a variety of categories and this could be something along the lines of gift vouchers or even a bonus in their pay packet.
Make yourself approachable: As a manager or business owners, there is a risk that employees may feel intimidated or nervous about approaching you. Make sure you adopt an attitude that lets them know they can approach you, as this will enable them to come to you with any concerns and worries as well as to put forward suggestions and ideas. An open door policy is always best if you want to promote a comfortable and happy atmosphere in the workplace.
Arrange social events: Arranging social events for your staff is a great way of getting everyone together and encouraging bonding. It also helps to make staff feel valued and more at ease. Even a social event once every few months can work wonders.
Tackle boredom with varied tasks: It is easy for employees to become bored if they are doing the same thing day in, day out. Try to eliminate the risk of boredom by giving staff a variety of different tasks to do. You can find out in one to one meetings what sort of tasks they are able to confidently do – and you can also provide training to increase their skills in other areas.
All of these methods can help to keep your staff more engaged and motivated. You can also arrange activities such as team away days and sessions in order to boost bonding between staff and management.
