Motivation is a force that drives us to begin developing, continue exploring, or stop participating in particular behaviours.
When it comes to the world of work, knowing how to motivate staff can help to make your team happier, more productive, more effective, better collaborators, and in turn, improve organisational outcomes such as talent retention, profit, reputation and social impact.
In short, motivating your people can help to lead your team and your wider organisation to achieve goals, increase profit and deliver impact.
Read more about the importance of employee motivation below. Alternatively, scroll to the bottom to discover the free webinar I run on this essential topic or click the button below to learn more and secure your place.
Recognising Demotivated Staff & The Causes
Unmotivated employees fail to complete tasks and projects on time, produce a low quality of work or struggle with productivity, engage in office drama, distance themselves from colleagues, and hold back in meetings, display a lack of creative ideas, and signs of burnout.
Staff can become unmotivated for many reasons, not limited boredom, lack of career progression, lack of confidence in management decisions, feeling overwhelmed by workload, feeling unappreciated or unheard, and due to personal issues.
How to Motivate Staff – Motivation Strategies
The strategies below are key to helping you understand how to motivate staff, and to actively begin improving motivation across your team.
1) Different Appreciation Methods – All employees will favour receiving appreciation in different ways. For example, some people might like to receive praise or appreciation in a public forum, while others would hate the idea and much prefer feedback in a one to one appointment. Similarly, some employees will value time to discuss challenges, training and the opportunity to talk things through in a one to one appraisal. For others this will seem unnecessary. Working with your employees to discover how they like to be appreciated will be essential to motivate them.
2) Purpose – Purpose might be one the most important pieces of the puzzle when it comes to how to motivate staff and helping employees to feel fulfilled and engaged. Ensure your staff understand the purpose of their team within the wider organisation, their particular role within the wider team, and within the wider organisation to increase motivation.
3) Ways of Working – Similarly, ensuring that staff understand the role they play in operational processes, and the role these processes play in the wider organisation is key. Are workers frustrated by an outdated or inefficient way of doing something? Are your team empowered to suggest changes?
4) Aspiration – Motivated staff understand the aim and aspiration of the organisation, and how their role and department plays into this aim. Similarly, organisations need to understand the aspirations of your employees, and take note of the connection between the company’s plans and the employee’s aspirations and expectations.
5) Compassionate Leadership – A blend of compassionate leadership and psychological safety are central to helping staff feel supported, appreciated and motivated.
How to Motivate Staff As Individuals
My How to Motivate Staff webinar on Wednesday June 5th, explores detailed ways in which you can decode the unique preferences of individual team members to effectively motivate them. Be sure to secure your free place on the webinar to harness this essential skill, but below are a few points you can begin exploring.
You can develop your understanding of how to motivate staff and identify the procedures and practices that will help to effectively maximise the motivation of each of your specific employees by:
- Asking for employee feedback and actioning points that may lead to making work more meaningful and motivating for employees. Capitalise on what motivates your talent.
- Building strong manager-employee relationships, with consistent communication. Being genuinely invested in your employees and what motivates them is key.
- Setting clear employee expectations. Unclear or unrealistic expectations lead to frustration, less creativity, and a fear of risk taking and innovation.
- Focusing on the strengths of your employees to find the right organisational fit for them. This can help your talent grow and develop within their roles, and produce a higher quality of work.
- Appreciating your employees and creating a culture that celebrates team “wins”, and not just employee wins. Recognition and appreciation is key to driving engagement and motivation.
In fact, the “5 Languages of Appreciation” book by Gary Chapman and Paul White is the ultimate companion guide when it comes to how to motivate staff, and one I regularly recommend to my clients looking to maximise motivation across their organisation.
The Benefits of Motivating Your Staff
By mastering motivation across your team you can not only unlock the abilities of your individual employees, and create stronger, happier, more committed teams, but collectively achieve your goals as a team/department.
By scaling this up across the organisation, with all teams and departments problem solving, innovating and fixing problems together, motivation has a compounding effect on the organisation, helping the business move into new markets, increasing customers and profit, and increasing psychological safety.
Leaders who explore how to motivate staff harness the following benefits:
1) Individual Benefits – A better sense of wellbeing, a sense of belonging, less stress, more dedication and loyalty, alignment of goals, talents and ambition, increased focus, and so much more.
2) Team Benefits – Motivated teams are more productive, better at problem solving, and cultivate a collective culture of “us” rather than individual competition. More motivated teams are more likely to innovate and produce better overall team results.
3) Organisational Benefits – Businesses with motivated employees experience increased productivity, results, profit, risk mitigation, staff satisfaction, less sickness, lower staff turnover, and better customer service and satisfaction.
The How to Motivate Staff Webinar
Join me, and fellow leaders from across the UK, to super-charge your leadership and take a guided deep dive into strategies that not only ignite motivation across your team, but address the inevitable frustrations surrounding this essential topic.
We’ll explore practical approaches to help you overcome the hurdles and blocks to team motivation, and delve into the subtle yet powerful languages of appreciation that help to create a harmonious culture of positive reinforcement and motivation.
Secure your free place today. Click the button below and look for future “How to Motivate Staff” webinars.