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Motivating the Masses
Eight simple tips to keep your employees working hard and feeling good about their jobs.
Your company is only as strong as the sum of its parts.
You’ve no doubt heard that phrase countless times. As overworked as it is, however, it’s also undeniably true. Whether you’re running a 10-person service company or a 500-person manufacturing operation, a team of highly motivated, hard-working employees is essential to your organization’s success. If your people aren’t adequately motivated, productivity will plummet.
Unfortunately, there’s no simple solution to this problem—no one way to motivate multiple people. That’s because motivation is internal, not external. Though the proverbial dangling carrot can motivate people for brief bursts, long-term motivation must come from within. More specifically, motivation comes from inspiration, which means that as a business owner or manager, you have tremendous power to influence the extent to which your employees are motivated to do their best work, day in and day out.
Here are nine helpful tips to help inspire your employees to perform with passion and pride.
1. Promote a positive environment. Seems obvious, but how many of you oversee working environments in which even a few employees don’t feel welcome or valued? Sure, every business has its own culture. But ask yourself: Does your company’s culture reflect your personal values or business ideals, or has it slowly evolved into something other than what you intended it to be? If your operation falls into the latter scenario, you’re assuming far too much risk. So evaluate the impact of your every move on office morale. Do your best to create a user-friendly physical environment and maintain a true open-door policy that enables all employees to freely interact with you and one another.
2. Share your plans. People do their best work when they understand not only what’s expected of them specifically, but also how their respective roles fit into the larger plan. There’s no better way to promote “another cog in the machine” mentality among your workforce than to keep your employees in the dark about where the company’s headed. If you’re hiring top-caliber employees, they don’t want just a job, they want to contribute to something special.
3. Provide professional development. Most employees are looking to develop new skills and acquire new challenges and responsibilities. Encourage those aspirations. Get to know their personal and professional goals and identify ways to provide them with the training or educational opportunities they need for advancement. Encourage them to attend industry-related workshops and seminars. Consider sending them to classes on the company’s dime. If employees feel that you’re investing in them, they’ll likely provide you with a handsome return on your investment, says Ann Bares, managing partner of Altura Consulting Group LLC, in Medina. “It’s proven to be a successful strategy,” she says. “The more marketable you make your employees, and the more you invest in keeping their skills up to date, the more likely they are to see you as a worthwhile employer and stay with you.”
4. Offer off-the-beaten-path benefits. We’re not talking bonuses here, though a well-designed bonus program can enhance employee performance. Rather, think more creatively. Consider negotiating discounts for your employees at a local fitness club or the coffeehouse down the block. Incentives and small rewards such as gift certificates, extended lunch hours, or other tokens of appreciation often work as motivational tools. Many companies offer free or discounted parking and pitch in for transportation costs. These days, on-site daycare and daycare support also are being adopted more frequently. Bares says that, as Baby Boomers continue to near retirement age, financial planning assistance can be a tremendous employee benefit. “It can be for something as rudimentary as how to balance a check book all the way up to how to plan for retirement and other long-term, strategic things,” she notes, adding that non-traditional benefits can be particularly effective for companies struggling to offer competitively priced healthcare packages. “This is an area in which employers can be more creative. Sometimes you can do less expensive but more meaningful things that fit your business and your demographics.”
5. Pile on the praise. Never underestimate the importance of a simple “thank you” or “job well done.” Make the necessary time to personally recognize the contributions and accomplishments of each employee and you’ll keep morale at lofty levels. Remember, if employees don’t feel appreciated, they’ll start working only for the paycheck. The second another company tries to entice them with heftier sums of money, they’ll have no reason to say, “no thanks.”
6. Arrive early. Lead by example and get to work before or alongside your employees. Who respects a leader who considers himself or herself above the rules?
7. Push positive energy. You have the power to make or break a day with the vibes you convey to your people. Even if your morning commute was a disaster, you’re well advised to enter the building with your head up high and a smile on your face. Chances are, you’ll have a more productive day.
8. Be creative about holiday rewards. With Christmas around the corner, this is a hot topic. Some business leaders consider the “holiday bonus” to be potentially poisonous to employee morale. Here’s why: Though employees will appreciatively accept the first one, they’ll eventually think of it as an entitlement. Then comes a bad year with no bonuses, and your employees are likely to resent you for “withholding” their holiday pay. With that in mind, consider offering alternative holiday rewards that help keep your employees happy and motivated. Offer flexible hours so employees can manage busy holiday schedules. Encourage employees to take a day off to do charitable work. Make charitable donations in your employees’ names. And if you’re determined to give gifts, make sure they’re from the heart and reflect the extent to which you value your employees as individuals.
Resources
The above ideas only scratch the surface. There are a huge variety of employee motivation tactics to consider, and an equally large number of underlying strategies to employ. Here are some resources that can get you started:
• www.workforce.com --this site is a comprehensive resource on practically every aspect of human resources that features everything from articles on training to compensation to, of course, motivation techniques, and much more; type in “employee motivation” into the search box on the home page and you’ll find a slew of articles and ideas.
• www.shrm.org --this site, the online resource from the Society for Human Resource Management, rivals Workforce.com as a potent storehouse of ideas and tips. Again, type “employee motivation” into the search box and you’ll get dozens of articles.
• Prefer to do your reading offline? Check out long-time business bestseller First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. The culmination of more than 80,000 interviews by The Gallup Organization, the book is devoted to exposing the common myths and misunderstandings of conventional management thinking. As such, it takes an in-depth look at employee performance and motivation, covering such topics as releasing employee potential, cultivating excellent performance, and much more.
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