Motivating Your Team: Top 5 Proven Modes of Success

Employees

These days, it’s crucial to create a positive, healthy work environment. With individuals spending more and more of their lives at work, it pays handsomely for upper management to think about key elements of employee satisfaction, and look for ways to integrate them into daily work life. “Happy” employees will grow the business via their loyalty and productivity, not to mention the benefit of favorable word of mouth that disseminates to the purchasing public.

  • Recognize Achievements

Personally recognized achievements will always be appreciated, but what elicits even more gratitude and makes a greater mark is recognizing the team as a whole. Recognizing quotas met, a certain number of days or months with no injuries or accidents on the job, the closure of a particularly valuable contract or any number of other important individual or company events will lead to greater job satisfaction. 

Be consistent, throughout the year with recognizing various achievements individually and as a team. Employees will be taking pride in their actions and breakthroughs, so it’s vitally important not to leave anyone behind in this process.

Consider offering employees company vouchers, free drinks in the lounge, a catered lunch or individual egift cards. Management can purchase egift cards directly online for popular retailers like Kohls, Best Buy, Walmart, etc. They can be purchased instantly, and delivered via text or email.

  • Build Trust Among Employees

Motivating employees is difficult if the individuals are not in a position to socialize or are ever given a reason to care about one another. Since much of our time is spent at work, the friendships formed there often go well beyond the scope of the work environment. Foster this with various trust building tools such as organizing social events at work, workshops, and sharing feedback. 

  • Ask Employees to Go Outside their Comfort Zone

If there’s one thing that kills employee motivation, it’s stagnation. Performing their role – while perhaps at a high level of quality – but still so acutely polished that there is no room for growth. Make a point of it to ask employees to do something that goes above and beyond what they expect of themselves. Give them the tools to get there, and what do you have on your hands? A group of highly-enthusiastic and motivated individuals who feel great about themselves and great about their job. 

Keep in mind though that this strategy does not equate to simply giving them more work to do. There would likely be resentment if you choose to go that route. Instead, ask them to think out of the box for new ideas, and give them slightly different yet challenging roles that require critical thinking. When they succeed, they’ll appreciate that you had faith in them.

  • Open Up the Lines of Communication

Effective ommunication can mean the difference between getting business done, and getting business done well. Workplaces are often filled with people who make up different generations, are different races, genders, sexual orientations, etc. Every one of these individuals has a separate and distinct way of communicating. Providing ways for those individuals to be heard, and to talk with others about their own methods of communication will improve the team’s understanding of one another, and ultimately, will allow them all to work better together.

Schedule regular daily and/ or weekly meetings for employees to speak their minds, offer ideas, air grievances, ask for help, and correct misunderstandings, all with the idea in mind of forming a more cohesive team unit.

  • Increase Autonomy

When employees are given the freedom to get their work done by themselves, well and on-time, they are already proving that they have earned a level of autonomy that perhaps has not been given to them before. Freedom to make their own choices will increase their sense of satisfaction in their role, and motivate them to think creatively and independently more often.

To allow employees to work in this fashion, it’s important to stay away from the lure of micro management, but instead set clear goals for individuals and teams to aspire to. How this is accomplished sets itself up for a great topic within communication-themed meetings. Employees can share their insights and creative development techniques with reference to how they handled a new or well-established task.

When you set out to motivate your team, you not only set your business up for success, you also create a workplace environment that positively taps into employee brainpower, talents, personalities, and ideas. The end result will be greater loyalty to the company, happier employees, and a service or product that you can truly be proud to call your own.

 

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