Keeping yourself and your team motivated
Motivating employees is vital if employers are to achieve maximum performance, productivity, loyalty and levels of engagement. Motivation is not just a management tactic; it’s a personal responsibility in any individual’s life. In business the overall culture and quality of the organisation’s management are key drivers, there are lots of other ‘carrots’ available to employers to help them improve motivation.
There are a wide variety of methods available for motivating staff, at prices to suit all budgets. These range from recognising employees’ achievements by simply saying ‘thank you’, to team building events, individual incentives, staff and team awards, social events and financial recognition.
The great thing about employee motivation is that it can be researched and recorded using techniques such as a motivation questionnaire. We’ve got a great survey available for your teams to use at www.illumine.co.uk/motivate-survey.
Our top tips to motivate
1. The link between innovation and motivation – your employees will have ideas about how to improve the organisation. Unfortunately, many managers fail to encourage the contribution of these ideas, sometimes they can inadvertently discourage this. By giving your employees access to creativity tools and techniques, and encouraging them to use them and share their findings you’ll motivate too.
2. Motivate yourself – a great place to start learning about motivation is to start understanding what motivates you. ‘Passion’ is contagious. If you’re passionate about your job and the organisation, others will become more positive too. Also, if you’re doing a good job of taking care of yourself and your own job, you’ll have a much clearer perspective on how others are doing in theirs. Find out what motivates you and your people by completing our motivation survey at www.illumine.co.uk/motivate-survey.
3. Know and agree on what’s required of you – team and individuals objectives and goals should be aligned to the goals of the organisation. Otherwise you’ll be wasting time and possibly changing the direction of the organisation. Goals and objectives will normally have been decided during strategic planning, and then delivered during individual appraisals and job reviews. A good way of motivating employees and teams is to ensure that they have input when identifying their goals. After all, people own what they help to create. Difficult situations can be resolved through the use of facilitators or facilitation skills – see www.illumine.co.uk/facilitate.
4. Understanding what creates ‘passion’ in your employees – Even though it sounds simple, creating passion at work requires skill and mastery to change behaviour patterns, and start your people thinking consciously and acting in a manner that will create passion in the workplace (we call this PassionFlow™).
We all know (hopefully) what it feels like to be passionate about our work. But few people can tell us what gives rise to that feeling. Our research reveals to us the “magic formula” for passion: “Passion is a strong emotion that happens within each of us when we are doing meaningful work that makes us feel better about ourselves at a pace that feels like real progress.”
We offer a programme called PassionWorks!™. It’s a programme that de-mystifies passion at work. Passionworks!™ will ensure individuals, teams and leaders find their passion in their work. This then ensures that they move towards PassionFlow™ (see figure 1). In doing this they will influence others around them to feel the same. Find out more at www.illumine.co.uk/pasw.
5. Support and endorse employee motivation – By recognising motivation and motivating from the top down you’ll see the results as they filter back up.
Established motivation schemes (such as performance and compensation systems, regular training, motivational policies and procedures) will ensure that you don’t just count on strong interpersonal relationships with employees to help motivate them. You need to remember that the nature of any relationship can change during times of change and stress.
6. Reward and celebrate – past, present and future – If someone does well they should be rewarded. Whether it’s a financial reward or just a ‘pat on the back’. You should be careful not to keep rewarding the same employees, as this breeds discontent. You should also be careful not to ignore what someone has done well, as this also breeds discontent. Rewards can be given in a public forum or in a private meeting.
Celebrating success is a good idea to generate team and individual motivation. The celebration could be at a company or team meeting; it could be at regular social events. Without ongoing acknowledgement of success, employees become frustrated, sceptical and even cynical about their efforts for the organisation.
This article features in our ‘Do More WIth Less’ Guide that was first published April 2009. Download your copy here.
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