Keep Your Team’s Spirits High: A Practical Guide to Employee Motivation
Employees are the gears that move an organization. To ensure they are in their best position to make optimal contributions to the organization’s success, you must make employee motivation a priority.
Since having productive employees is crucial to achieving your goals, keeping their morale up is the key to ensuring a company’s success.
Want to learn more about employee motivation? This article discusses its importance, why it is important, and what you can do to support it.
What Is Employee Motivation? Why Is It Important?
Motivation is what drives people to do their best at work every day. It is their level of commitment and the energy they put in every task, every day.
Motivated employees are enthusiastic about doing their tasks, and they take pride in their output. They also tend to finish tasks more quickly and take the initiative to perform better every day, not only for the company but also for themselves.
Motivation is what makes an employee move more energetically at work. This means that employees who accomplish tasks slower than usual and spend more time doing things unrelated to work are most likely unmotivated.
Plus, these employees also tend to be unfocused at work – giving only halfhearted efforts and yielding half-baked results.
Without motivation, employees will become less productive. And as you know, the lower their output is, the more likely a company will fall short of its goals.
It doesn’t matter if you’re already at the top of your game or still on your way up. You need motivated employees to propel your business at every level, making sure they are motivated every step of the way.
6 Ways to Boost Employee Morale
There are lots of ways to boost your team’s morale. From making small-but-significant changes in company policies to signing them up for employee motivation training courses, here are six tips for improving employee motivation:
1. Support work-life balance.
Improving performance isn’t always a matter of powering through work and undergoing rigorous training. Sometimes, it’s a matter of maintaining a work-life balance.
If you’re working with remote staff, then you’re already off to a good start. The next step is to encourage team leaders to focus on output and productivity rather than hours. And don’t forget to review workloads regularly and consider offering paid time off.
2. Encourage regular breaks.
Based on research, only one in five people takes lunch breaks at work. Studies also show that white-collar workers are less likely to go on breaks. This means that too many employees have working lunches, which can be detrimental to their motivation and overall health.
To prevent this from affecting their work, make sure your employees take the time to stand up and get away from their desks. Please encourage them to grab a cup of coffee, stretch their body, or even get some fresh air outside, as long as they do it for at least five minutes for every hour of work.
3. Recognize a job well done.
Appreciating your employees’ contributions is one of the easiest ways to motivate them.
Employees become more productive and experience more self-worth if they feel truly appreciated, so make sure you focus on the good.
Based on Gallup’s book “How Full Is Your Bucket,” offering positive recognition regularly to employees can also yield:
- Better employee engagement levels
- Improved morale
- Deeper employee loyalty to the company
- Enhanced customer satisfaction
According to Gallup, workplace recognition also leads to higher employee retention and can affect the company’s bottom line. This makes employee recognition a low-cost, high-impact practice that is crucial to company success.
4. Organize a company retreat.
Having team-building trips can also be a great way to keep your employees’ spirits up. There are many options available for this – from adventure-type getaways to wellness retreats.
Don’t forget to incorporate team-building games and activities to promote collaboration and support a positive work culture. These can also aid in enhancing problem-solving across the team and cultivate relationships through open and meaningful communication. With these, you can also get their creative juices flowing, improve productivity, and, ultimately, boost employee morale.
Of course, you can also choose a company retreat that lets your employees relax and have fun. Wellness retreats serve as a great avenue to reinvigorate their tired bodies and uplift their spirits.
5. Listen to your employees.
Getting employee feedback is another excellent way to boost their motivation as it lets them know that you hear them and that their opinions matter.
Studies show that 87 percent of employees are looking to experience job development but only receive a third of the feedback they require. Those who don’t get feedback are 40 percent more likely to be disengaged.
Moreover, 78 percent say that getting their hard work recognized can motivate them to perform better at their jobs.
If you haven’t heard about these statistics before, then you probably aren’t listening enough to your staff.
Of course, listening is just the beginning. You also need to act on the feedback that employees provide you.
While you can’t possibly work on every suggestion they have, you should at least try to meet them halfway. And never forget to thank them for voicing out their suggestions.
Remember that welcoming employee feedback isn’t something that can only happen during the company’s annual performance review. It should be a core part of your company culture and incorporated in business operations all year round.
6. Invest in employee motivation courses.
The happier an employee is, the better results he can deliver for the company. However, there can also be times when the job becomes too easy that employees become complacent.
Because of this, managers tend to have a more difficult time finding and delivering the proper balance to yield a motivated and driven workforce.
If this is the case for your company, it is probably time to invest in employee motivation training for your managers.
Employee motivation training courses are designed to show managers how to get the best out of motivated and confident employees to ensure that they are driven to perform well in their job constantly. These programs cover helpful topics, such as:
- How to approach motivation psychologically.
- How to use the reinforcement or expectancy theories
- How personality affects motivation
- How to set goals
- How to address specific issues related to morale
Motivated, Driven, Productive
Motivated employees are driven and productive members of an organization. To keep your team’s spirits high, you must learn how to motivate them and incorporate this into the workplace setting.
