How to Motivate Employees: 7 Proven Strategies

by Srikant Chellappa Aug 6,2024
Engagedly
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The People Strategy Leaders Podcast

with Srikant Chellappa, CEO

The success of your business depends on your employees. Aside from their skills, you have to factor in motivation as part of the equation. Because no matter how talented your employees are, it won’t matter if they are not motivated.

Worse, when employees lose interest in their work, it leads to them leaving. If you already have a resource crunch, the last thing you want is attrition. As their manager, it is your responsibility to boost their morale and get them working with vigor.

We have come up with a couple of employee motivation strategies that you can implement to ensure that your team’s performance is top-notch!

1. Be Transparent

Employees are motivated if they know the purpose of their job. That means you have to communicate the goals and objectives of the projects. More importantly, you need to share the same information with everybody.

By providing employees with everything they need to know about the tasks, you earn their trust. And if they believe in you, you can expect them to do a much better job moving forward.

This might become a challenge if you work with remote employees in the organization. You can use different collaboration tools to help keep everyone in the loop.

2. Promote Teamwork

Aside from having a clear sense of purpose, employees must learn how to work with each other as a team. You cannot simply force employees into team-building activities and make them understand teamwork. A few hours of activities will not magically transform them into a cohesive unit. Let employees figure things out and let things naturally happen. 

However, at the core of teamwork is proper communication. You try to have open communication among your employees. Implement the best tools and strategies. This way, they can discuss their project plan effectively.

They can use the different communication channels that you provided for them to socialize and build better relationships. Once your team has fluid communication with each other, you have fertile ground for employee engagement.

If you run an established company and your past work has resulted in growth, add to your team. For example, if your business is up 18% compared to last year, your team will need extra resources to handle that growth. Adding more staff helps your existing team know that they are valued, respected, and motivated to keep pressing forward.

3. Acknowledge Accomplishments

The easiest and most effective way to motivate your employees is to acknowledge a job well done. Regardless of how big or small their accomplishments are, management must acknowledge the hard work. Employees gain a sense of pride and purpose in the things they do in your organization.

Implement an employee appreciation program that grants the best-performing employees the recognition they value. Financial rewards include (but are not limited to) bonuses, increased salary, paid time off, and stock options. Non-monetary rewards could be job security, internal career development, and flexible work hours and locations. Apart from these, you can create an effective video that motivates your employees.

Structure your program in such a way that the rewards are fair and make sense. For instance, you can’t offer monetary rewards if your company can’t afford them. But even in highly profitable organizations, non-monetary rewards are usually the best way to go when acknowledging accomplishments. When you’re deciding on rewards, forget spreadsheets and focus on things you know will make your people smile.

4. Offer Internal Job Opportunities

Employees are more than just cogs in a wheel. Cultivate their desire to grow and build their skills. This is why you need internal training programs to improve your skills.

You can purchase online courses and programs that your team can take in their free time and at their own pace. Whether the course is about selling products to another business or learning how to market on social media, the goal is to help them build their skills so they can contribute to your company in more meaningful ways.

After completing a course, they should receive certification to prove that they passed the course. The accreditation also doubles as an incentive to take the program seriously.

If possible, bring your employees to training seminars to network with other professionals and learn from the top practitioners in their field.

Another example of how to increase employee motivation is formal workplace mentoring programs. This is because employee motivation is closely tied to engagement, and that’s why many organizations leverage mentoring programs to increase employee engagement and retention. They use mentoring software to match employees and use its reporting tools to keep track of how each pair (mentor and mentee) is doing.

5. Encourage Breaks

High-performing employees in the organization are difficult to manage. They get too immersed in their jobs and they put their well-being on the back burner. Even if they recognize that they need time to recover physically and mentally, your organization probably doesn’t have a program in place that champions mental well-being.

It doesn’t help if your workplace promotes a sedentary lifestyle where employees sit down and face the computer screen the whole day. In this case, the most obvious answer is to recommend that they take breaks and use their vacation leaves to recharge.

Since you can’t force employees to take breaks, the next best thing you can do is educate them on health issues. Provide them with a library of bestselling books about health, food, and positive thinking. Some may borrow and read them during their free time. 

To help promote a healthy culture in the workforce, look for marathons, mini-triathlons, and sports leagues that you and your team train for and participate in. Not only do you encourage people to take a breather from work, but you get to do this together as a team. This builds even greater rapport and camaraderie among employees, which helps build up morale and motivation.

6. Allow Flexible Work Schedules

While many businesses do not allow employees to work remotely all the time, there’s a possibility that a hybrid work arrangement will become the new standard moving forward. This is where people work from home for part of the week and work at the office on specified days.

It’s a fair compromise, especially for companies that can’t operate without employees in their office locations. However, what’s important is that everybody meets their goals and completes their tasks on or before their respective deadlines.

In this case, you need to help employees work productively regardless of what setup your organization adopts. You must align your project scheduling techniques based on their availability in the office or at home for a hybrid work setup. You want to provide employees with goals they can achieve over a reasonable period, given their current structure and schedule. 

There are new productivity and performance tools that can help you establish boundaries by signaling bosses and co-workers that an individual team member is or is not available for interruptions.  

You can ask your company to give employees access to a coworking space. There might be times when their home internet is not available, or the office is filled up with other employees scheduled at that time, or two people need to work side-by-side for a day or two each week, but don’t want the distraction of the office around them.

A coworking space allows them to continue their productivity without missing a beat and provides access to resources and perks. (Example: Networking opportunities with other remote workers)

7. Listen to Your People

It’s important to acknowledge people for their achievements. To make motivation even more powerful, spend time listening and talking to your employees. 

Encourage employees to reach out to you in person regarding their concerns. Employees are not just workers defined by what they do at the office but also individuals with hopes and aspirations. As their leader, you need to align their dreams with what they do at work to give them a sense of direction.

To start a habit of getting your team to talk with you (and each other), open your meetings or gatherings with an ice-breaker — interesting, team-building questions that everyone in the group can answer. This shared experience helps build trust and camaraderie.

As the group leader, it’s your role to make sure everyone gets a chance to speak and that the quieter voices aren’t drowned out by the louder, more confident team members. This leads to a culture where everyone knows that what they have to say is valued.

There might be times when employees are afraid to reach out to you with information about their workplace observations or lack the confidence to make recommendations. In such scenarios, set up a suggestion box in the break room where people can share their information anonymously. They would feel that their concerns are conveyed even if they’re reluctant to have a full conversation.  

Conclusion

You can also conduct a survey with questions about the company and find ways to resolve or improve your team’s environment based on their responses. By encouraging everyone to use their voice, you give them the power to make memorable and meaningful changes in the workplace for the better. All you have to do is listen to their concerns.


Want to learn more tips to motivate your team? Wondering how to enhance their performance? Engagedly can help you with that!

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This article is written by Christopher Jan Benitez.

Christopher Jan Benitez is a freelance writer for hire who specializes in the digital marketing field. His work has been published on SEO and affiliate marketing-specific niches like Monitor Backlinks, Niche Pursuits, Nichehacks, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, and others.

Author
Srikant Chellappa
CEO & Co-Founder of Engagedly

Srikant Chellappa is the Co-Founder and CEO at Engagedly and is a passionate entrepreneur and people leader. He is an author, producer/director of 6 feature films, a music album with his band Manchester Underground, and is the host of The People Strategy Leaders Podcast. He is currently working on his next book, Ikigai at the Workplace, which is slated for release in the fall of 2024.

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