It’s early Monday morning, and your employees are slowly trickling in. Their shoulders sag, bags under their eyes are visible, and one thing is clear: no one is driven to work.
Every manager struggles at times to keep employees motivated, but great managers understand that employee motivation is critical to overall success.
It is critical to keep your staff energetic and motivated in order to maintain excellent workplace productivity and performance. However, in most workplaces, only 36% of employees are engaged and motivated. With an engaged employee, you can establish an entire culture in which people are motivated to grow and achieve in their roles. It takes time to figure out which strategies work best for motivating your personnel.
While there is no single method for ensuring that your staff remains engaged and motivated, there are a few unique and successful approaches that, when adopted, can have significant and long-term effects on workplace productivity and motivation.
In this article, we will discuss 8 effective techniques and strategies to motivate and engage your employees.
8 Effective Techniques to Motivate Your Employees
Here are 8 effective techniques and strategies to help you motivate your employees and keep them engaged.
- Foster communication
- Offer employee benefits
- Encourage teamwork
- Appreciate the staff
- Be someone you’d work for
- Offer growth opportunities
- Set small goals
- Ask what they need
Let’s dive in..
- Foster communication
No one desires to work under a supervisor who makes him feel uneasy. Using ways for developing excellent communication with your staff will do marvels for the motivation of your employees.
A committed employee will invariably have questions, comments, or reservations about her job. Establishing an open-door policy and making regular lines of communication available will make your staff feel appreciated (which it should). If maintaining an open door approach is out of the question, it can be just as effective to allocate some time during briefings for people to express or write down their issues for a discussion.
Checking up with your staff about their feedback is just as crucial as asking them for it. Though you will not be able to answer to every query or ‘save the world,’ keeping tabs tells staff that you took the time to consider their issues rather than dismissing them or passing them to somebody else.
Your employees will know that you are attentive to them and will not be scared to approach you again in the future.
- Offer employee benefits
Employees typically anticipate normal perks such as medical insurance, paid time off, and even flexibility. You can incentivize employees by raising the level of their benefits. Add game rooms to assist employees to unwind during the day, a cafeteria to keep spirits up, or even one mental health day every month.
Offering childcare or remote work freedom are two additional excellent methods to motivate staff. These kinds of incentives improve health, promote team enthusiasm, and encourage employees to stay with your company for a longer period of time.
Create a distinct incentive program that rewards staff for constantly working hard, as opposed to celebrating milestones or triumphs. Non-monetary benefits, such as more paid holidays, shorter workweeks, or an option of parking spaces, could be introduced. It is not even necessary for your incentive scheme to be performance-based.
You could use it, for instance, to encourage your employees to engage in training courses by paying members of the team who give the best results per week.
- Teamwork for team engagement
The best companies are those in which everyone works well together.
Encouragement and promotion of teamwork increase productivity by making people feel less alone and more involved with their activities. You may accomplish this by organizing regular team-building activities and providing opportunities for your teammates to connect and get to know one another.
You can always think of new ideas for team engagement and keep things fresh and non-monotonous for your employees. Conduct team excursions, or weekly ‘rant’ meetings where employees can talk their hearts out about anything they like.
Consider this while hiring new employees by assessing how they will contribute to the team and the workplace culture. Even if someone has previous expertise in a role, this does not guarantee that they will perform well with the rest of your team.
- Appreciate the staff
When the company reaches a milestone, it is critical that you notify your staff and enjoy the achievement together. However, this is more than just a celebration of company milestones. You should demonstrate to your team members how much you appreciate them by commemorating events such as weddings, birthdays, births, and anniversaries, to mention a few.
Employees appreciate modest gestures. A simple ‘thank you’ or ‘good job’ goes a long way. It motivates them to maintain a high-quality and efficient work ethic. You can also express your gratitude by taking your colleagues out of the office for drinks or a team supper.
- Be someone you’d work for
Whether it’s unreasonable expectations, constant irritability, or unapproachability, most of us have had that one boss that made work a living hell. Even if you enjoy what you do, a disgruntled boss can quickly ruin a dream career. This is why, in order to motivate your colleagues, you must be someone you would like to work for.
It’s been claimed that laughs are contagious, so if you stay upbeat and excited to come to work every day, your coworkers will follow suit. People do not want to impress someone who appears unappealing, thus being enthusiastic about the work being done in your company is essential.
When you enjoy coming to work, your employees will enjoy working for you and will be encouraged to keep the good feelings going.
Despite our best intentions, we all fall short of promises at times. Acknowledging that your employees are human beings, not programmable robots, is critical for keeping them motivated as a manager. An employee who is afraid to disclose mistakes to her manager will be unhappy in her career.
If, on the other hand, that same employee understands that her supervisor will be empathetic to her position, she will be delighted to get her work done since she will know that someone is there to assist her anytime she needs it.
- Offer growth opportunities
Team members feel more useful when they are studying and upgrading their talents. It also helps you increase profitability by up to 21%. To inspire and drive your employees to achieve great things, give opportunities for growth and advancement.
These opportunities should be personalized to the particular employee and can take the shape of further training, setting difficult goals, allowing an employee to observe you, or dedicating your own time to teaching and mentoring someone.
Concentrate on offering your employees transferable skills that they may use in numerous positions and encourage them to set learning objectives for themselves.
- Set small goals
Smaller, measurable goals might help you keep motivated while working on a project. Whether your company has a system in place to track completed work or you create your own, assisting your team in setting goals that are acceptable and feasible may keep employees engaged and encouraged when they reach significant milestones.
For example, if your team has been entrusted with renovating a client’s office space, you may encourage them to create smaller targets like interviewing project manager candidates, establishing a contract with the one they decide, speaking with architects, and making layout and finishing decisions.
Each of these activities puts your staff closer to the finished office setting, and it can be enjoyable to cross these items off the broader list to demonstrate measurable progress.
- Ask what they need
Determine what your employees want and deliver it to them. According to research, tastes are dynamic and fluctuate depending on the circumstance. Preferences also shift over time, and employees may mislead about their true desires. So, first and foremost, ask them what they want. Then, after a week, ask them again. And then again a month later. Listen, acknowledge, and provide if they say the same thing every time.
Wrapping Up
That’s all for this article. Hopefully, now that you have read the article, you can easily use these tips and techniques to motivate your employees and boost workplace productivity. Remember, an engaged workforce can help you boost your profits by up to 21%.
There are several other ways that you can motivate and inspire your employees. Experiment and see what they appreciate best. If there’s an idea you want to share, don’t forget to reach out to us via comments.
Author – Tuba Sarosh
Tuba Sarosh is a result-driven SEO content writer and editor, who helps businesses turn their readers into clients. She writes about trends, tips, how-tos, and other cool stuff that helps businesses serve their customers better. When not writing, she’s either reading a good book or experimenting with recipes.
EDTECH 4 BEGINNERS 
3 Comments