Entrepreneurs and small business owners already have a lot on their plate; dealing with unmotivated employees can frustrate even the best of them.
The truth is that it takes empathy and kindness to understand any problems that might plague your teams. Leaders must help inspire them as a way to truly invest in their potential.
There are ways to make sure that your employees stay inspired and engaged. Here, we’ve outlined some tried-and-tested strategies that can have lasting and significant effects on workplace productivity and motivation.
Create A Supportive Culture
Unrealistic expectations, unapproachability, and constant crabbiness of their managers can rub off on people and make the workplace environment unreasonably overwhelming. Even if your employees love what they do, miserable management can demotivate them.
Help them stay positive and motivated by creating an environment that empowers your employees. It is essential to have a one-on-one relationship, so they know that you are on their team just as much as they are on yours.
This should also help you figure out what kind of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards motivate them.
Create an Agile Work Environment
Another incredibly extremely powerful approach to upholding employee motivation is to create an agile work environment for them.
Agile work culture refers to the fast-paced strategies for project and performance management that highlights constant adjustment and change over adhering to a stiff structure. While this technique is usually leveraged in software development, its values are effective in any industry.
Furthermore, creating an agile work environment is also pivotal to measure your policies’ success and impact on employee’s overall performance and productivity. You can measure this by deploying an objective and critical results OKR app that can essentially help you with employees’ performance and task management.
With an OKR software like Profit.co, you can set, communicate, track and measure goals and analyze results effectively within your business.
Furthermore, track their goal progress, completion, road blockers. This allows the management to gauge the overall organizational productivity.
Incentivize Your Workplace
Providing rewards or incentives for achieving specific goals is an effective way to inspire your team members to go over and beyond their tasks. Making jobs/responsibilities both fun and gratifying is a surefire way to boost employee engagement and motivation.
Many employers have executed an approach called ‘gamification’ with success. This involves applying game-playing elements to usual work tasks to create friendly competition and generate enthusiasm in the workplace.
Google is a great example when it comes to the implementation of this strategy, what is known as “Google Code Jam – the organization arranges a coding competition to hire potential candidates.
Establish An Emotional Reconnection
One of the most potent driving forces when it comes to motivation is the longing for connection. When employees lose their motivation to work, it is most likely because they get disconnected from their peers, team, and manager.
And a great way to reignite their enthusiasm and passion is to reconnect with them on an emotional level – to explore their sentiments, identify what they need, and have conversations that help them reconnect.
Foster Transparency And Open Communication
It is vital to have transparency and open communication with your employees across the organization. It is crucial to sustaining and maintaining employee motivation. Naturally, no one likes to work with a manager they feel uncomfortable approaching.
Therefore, you need to implement methods and practices that help you establish effective communication and collaboration with your team. It will go a long way and will do wonders in inspiring and motivating your employees.
An employee who is invested in their responsibilities will logically have comments, concerns, or questions.
Have an open-door policy to create accessible and dependable communication lines to help your employees feel that their input is valuable and their contribution matters.
Let Them Experiment New Things
Naturally, anybody can get bored of performing the same tasks and responsibilities over and over again. Reignite their creativity and passion by giving them the work that improves their learning curve.
Give your team challenges and encourage them to try out new work, behaviors with different people. It can include delegating things or executing new ideas. Then, it becomes a win for that person and you.
The most significant hurdle and challenge towards achieving employee motivation are often conflicting priorities and lackluster strategy when it comes to development and training.
You can minimize this issue by presenting your workforce with an opportunity to think outside the box. Also, don’t forget to offer them recognition and rewards for doing so.
Wrapping Up
It is essential to bear in mind that explicit communication is integral to developing a lasting connection with your employees. It helps you understand their perspectives and expectations.
Inspiring passion and motivation is an indispensable component to productivity and success. Hopefully, the above steps can help you cultivate enthusiasm and motivation in the workplace while keeping your employees satisfied.