Keeping a busy workforce motivated can be challenging. Here are some things that you can do that will help inspire employees to do their best work.
Promote Healthy Habits
Feeling healthy enables people to excel. When people feel unwell, they may struggle to summon the motivation to take on a busy day or perform well at work. In contrast, when they feel well, they’re better equipped to bring their A game to anything that they do.
There are several things that you can do to encourage healthy habits in your workforce. A workplace wellness program is a great starting point. These types of programs supplement traditional healthcare plans. They can even save employers money on providing healthcare benefits by making people healthier and decreasing utilization of other benefits. Workplace wellness programs may involve nutritional counseling, smoking cessation support, or fitness club memberships.
You might also consider addressing wellness topics such as nutrition or physical fitness in company newsletters. You should refrain from authoring your own medical advice, but you can share informative articles on subjects concerning general health and wellness. For example, you can share articles on weight loss, the Thrive patch or other health supplements, and the benefits of walking every day.
Your employees will value knowing that their health is important to you. It lets them know that they mean more to you than their individual job roles and that you care about the whole person rather than just the employee.
Encourage Group Efforts
A company that celebrates teamwork can create a fantastic motivational environment. When people identify themselves as the member of a team, they’re better able to stay engaged in projects and they feel incentivized to contribute to the best of their ability. Make it a point to cheer on teamwork and encourage effective collaboration by commending group efforts that yielded good results.
A good way to help teams work well together is giving them a project management program that they can use to stay in touch with one another and track projects’ progress. This type of software is helpful when more than one person is working on a task because they consolidate information in one place and provide clarity about who is responsible for each piece of a project.
Offer Meaningful Bonuses or Sales Incentives
Implementing a bonus system can have a great motivational influence. People will push themselves to do better work when it will provide them with a substantive benefit.
Of course, you need to structure bonuses in a way that makes them reasonably attainable. If the threshold for earning a bonus is too high, then people may not even attempt achieving it. Likewise, it may be inadvisable to limit the number of bonuses that you distribute. If employees feel as though they’re being pitted against one another, it can feel isolating and discourage teamwork. A little friendly competition is good but not to the extent that it causes individual disengagement or segmentation of different departments within a company.
Consider a bonus system that has different tiers of rewards. Once an employee crosses each tier, the size of the bonus increases. Also, weigh the pros and cons of offering group bonuses. Some employers are reluctant to get on board with group bonuses because it may unjustly enrich employees who haven’t done their fair share of work in achieving a particular outcome while unfairly depriving others. Nevertheless, group bonuses can also foster good communication and teamwork. People generally enjoy getting to share in an achievement with their colleagues.
Ultimately, the right type of bonus system for your company depends on a lot of different factors including how closely employees need to work with one another, the results you’ve seen with past bonus structures, and the size of bonuses relative to employees’ base pay.
Make Performance Reviews Helpful
It’s rather common for both supervisors and employees alike to dread performance reviews. Supervisors don’t relish having to tell employees that they’re not meeting expectations. Employees may feel extremely anxious or even hostile about the prospect of reproach in a review. Moreover, differences of opinion about what someone is doing can make for a very tense review process.
Furthermore, some companies simply don’t give performance reviews the attention that they deserve. Supervisors and employees may feel like they’re just going through motions or it’s an exercise that doesn’t have any real constructive application.
However, taking the time to make the most of performance reviews can be very motivating. Talking to employees in detail about what they’re doing well inspires them to keep up that level of performance. Likewise, substantive input about what isn’t going well and identifying avenues for improvement will give people an action plan on how to improve.
Motivation has a strong relationship to employees’ performance as well as their job satisfaction. Making motivation a priority in your employee management benefits both individual employees and the company as a whole.
