As a manager, one of your most important jobs is to keep your employees motivated. Once you have clearly defined goals, your team needs to be working in unison to achieve them. The ways to increase employee motivation are surprisingly simple. Below I outline 5 strategies to consider:
1. Be genuinely open with them
When people feel like they have a seat at the table, they naturally want to help make everyone at the table successful. By sharing transparently the state of the business and tackling concerns together as a team, you’ll get a ton of buy-in. I started Weekly Update in part because I saw how valuable it was for my team to share updates each week and be transparent with each other.
2. Give them tons of responsibility
People feel ownership and give it everything they have when they are responsible for big, important things. If someone feels like they are doing menial work that doesn’t advance the mission, they fizzle out. As a manager, you should continuously look for new challenges for your employees. If you notice an employee that doesn’t seem to be as productive as they were before, a common issue is that they are not being challenged by their current tasks. It’s your job to continuously feed them more interesting problems to solve.
3. Pay them well with cash + equity
This one is a no brainer… people need the base level of needs covered in order to get the motivation to excel. Quickly knock out the easy stuff by compensating everyone fairly and competitively. At the end of the day, compensation is still among the most important motivators. If you think about the classic “hierarchy of needs,” good compensation is going to be at the top and other important items, like office environment, come below.
4. Create a great work environment
People will want to give it their all when they are working in a supportive, upbeat and well run environment. That means having clear communication processes, never having any jerks on the team and being realistic about goals and desired results. Managers must treat everyone with respect and try to foster creativity when employees suggest new ideas. This goes a long way toward increasing employee motivation and making everyone feel valued.
5. Set the right example
As a leader, you need to always be willing to first do anything that you’d then delegate to your team. Setting example on work ethic, quality, treating people with respect and communicating well are all great ways to increase employee motivation. For example, if you expect your staff to maintain certain work hours (for example, being at the office by 9am) but you don’t follow the same rule yourself, it’s unlikely that others will be motivated to follow it either.
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