Tips for motivating employees in the workplace

24 Feb Tips for motivating employees in the workplace

An employer, a manager, an executive, a manager: all these people have different responsibilities. Among these, there is undoubtedly that of motivating employees and pushing the team to give the best of themselves to achieve company objectives. A properly motivated employee is a worker who is more committed to every single action, who is more willing to make some small sacrifices for the company, and who hardly decides to leave their job to go to work elsewhere (in this sense, motivate employees becomes an excellent action also for the employee retention strategy). But how do you motivate a team effectively? Before looking at specific actions for motivating employees in the workplace, let’s look at the general approach to your team.

Tips for motivating employees in the workplace

Define the objectives in detail: even before starting to motivate employees, it is necessary to clarify the objectives they must strive for. It is not uncommon for managers to give instructions to their team without clearly indicating the final objectives. Those who do not involve employees cannot think they can motivate them in the right way: reaching the goal is a victory for the company and the employee, and this must be clear from the outset.

 Create a happy work environment

If employees continually face obstacles, difficult hours or manager’s a bad mood, they cannot be happy to work. The first move to motivating employees is to make them feel at ease, valuing the workspace and always addressing them with the respect they deserve. Creating a happy work environment means eliminating dangers, providing areas for relaxation, and so on.

Recognize good results

When the team or an individual worker reports a good result, it is necessary to recognize it and emphasize that that action has been noticed. Some managers, assuming that employees are paid exactly to do their best, tend not to highlight workers’ small successes. But it is a big mistake: recognizing the goals achieved is one of the best ways to motivate the entire team and also allows you to establish a fundamental emotional connection within the group.

Don’t think about rewards just in terms of money

Employees undoubtedly value financial rewards very much. To motivate employees, however, cash rewards are not particularly effective: when a worker already has fair play, it should be emphasized that purely economic incentives tend to lose importance, affecting little or no employee’s daily satisfaction. . So yes, salary increases are certainly significant to encourage the worker to always do his best but, beyond a certain threshold, it is good to think about other bonuses.

Grant autonomy to employees

Granting a margin of autonomy to the team means demonstrating one’s trust in employees. There is no doubt: everyone likes to be masters of their time and energy, and for this reason giving more autonomy is equivalent to effectively motivating the team.

How to relate to your collaborators

What is the correct way for managers to relate to their collaborators? We must assume that the relationship between the coordinator and coordinated involves at least four different aspects on a psychological level. First, the manager must transfer the objectives to be achieved to his subordinates, translating them for each employee into personal tasks. Then he must work to improve the relationship with the people of the team to work serenely and in a context of full sharing of information and knowledge. It must also be able to properly stimulate employees in order to improve results and encourage teamwork. Finally, it must analyze collaborators to identify their strengths and make the most of them, identifying weaknesses simultaneously.

It is critically important that every team member feels part of the group.  A perception of imbalance regarding fairness within a workgroup can ruin the climate and drastically lower individual members’ performance. Several actions can give the perception of inequity: even going to reward a collaborator who has distinguished himself for commitment and results achieved, if done in the wrong way, can lead to a negative perception for the other members of the group.

Everything is about setting up communication between managers and subordinates correctly to build a transparent, direct, loyal and sincere relationship. First of all, communication must always be equal. This does not mean that the manager must stop being a manager: rather, it means that, while fully respecting their respective roles, each discourse must be carried out through an equal discussion, in which the opinion of the manager does not automatically have the upper hand.

It is also necessary to always express your opinion in time and instead avoid doing it after the game is over. The manager must give precise instructions, inquire and discuss before each action, and encourage other members to do the same instead of avoiding giving their own opinion afterward. No team can work calmly until the “I would have done differently” attitude is one of the most frequent.

Words are also important with regard to the relationship between manager and subordinates. Therefore, when in doubt, it is always good to speak literally, without using words that could be misunderstood or overloaded with meaning.

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