One of the biggest misconceptions in the business world is that motivation at work will remain at the highest level forever. It may be enjoyable and exciting for a newcomer to start a different project, but if the employer does not make any effort, after a while this balloon deflates and a reluctant, pessimistic person is left behind.
We all know that the happy photos shared on Instagram do not reflect the real world 100%. Every person has good and bad days, this is very normal. As a manager, what you need to do is to get to know your employees, support them on bad days and take measures to increase motivation.
Let’s continue our article by sharing a few tips on what you can do when you feel the motivation decreases.
Steps to Provide Motivation at Work
Safety First
If an employee is unsure whether he or she will be paid and feels that he or she can be dismissed at any time, he or she cannot fully commit to the job. Some companies deliberately do not sign a written contract and do not specify the privileges at work. In this way, they think that employees will work harder, fearing that they could lose their job at any time.
On the contrary, this leads to people looking for other jobs and complaining all the time. As a result, someone in this state of mind will not help you to achieve your goals.
According to the industrial psychologist Dr Vander Elst, employees who have no security in the company suffer from poor physical and mental health, reduced job satisfaction and reduced performance.
In this case, what managers should do is to prepare a contract that will not allow this mistrust to occur when hiring new people to the company and make sure that employees feel good in the company. At the same time, having regular conversations with new teammates and correcting things that are missing/wrong will also increase work efficiency.
Realistic Goals
If there are no goals in a company, people start to set themselves small goals that are below their potential. For example, if you do not give a deadline for a blogger to complete his content, this work will be finished in a month when it could be finished in a week. Firstly, you should give them a deadline according to the performance of your employees. Afterwards, you can move your goals to other places; such as attracting 100,000 unique visitors per month to blog content.
If you set realistic goals in front of your employees by getting to know them, their self-confidence will increase and they will be satisfied as they achieve things. Self-confident and satisfied individuals also do their jobs with excitement.
Accept Differences
One of the critical mistakes of managers is to treat everyone in the same way. If Zeynep can start working in customer service after 3 days of training, this does not mean that 3 days of training will be enough for Ahmet. If Zeynep has experience in this field, Ahmet may need more time to understand the job.
If managers want to understand the needs and situations of their teammates, they should talk to them one by one. In this way, the manager will stop being an unreachable person and show his human side, which will enable employees to express their ideas and wishes more easily.
Groove’s development process is a good example. Since the team works remotely, it is not possible for them to communicate with each other all the time. After a while, instead of expressing their dissatisfaction, they accumulated it inside themselves. When Alex Turnbull the CEO of the company, realised the gravity of the situation, he decided to talk to the team one-on-one:
“We talked briefly about what they do for the business. Most of the conversations were about working at Groove, the team they have, the challenges they face and my performance as CEO.”
In these conversations, Alex Turnbull asked all employees to be more open and express their feelings honestly. In this way, people started to express themselves better and improve their relationships in communication channels such as Slack.
If employees feel safe enough to share their feelings, it will be the perfect basis for increasing loyalty and motivation to the company.
Beautiful Failures
“Beautiful failure” is used in Silicon Valley for projects that were well planned and executed, but failed for unavoidable reasons, such as changes in the market. In other words, if you play well but still don’t win, you have lost beautifully. If you penalise your employees in situations like this, you are dampening their risk-taking instinct and damaging their motivation. This will kill their creativity in the long run.
To be inspired by successful executives, you can find a list of 5 TED talks here.
Appreciation
Appreciation is the most basic step to increase the motivation of employees to work. Although managers think that the salary they pay takes care of this job, this is not a reality. Today, salary is not enough to motivate and keep employees in the company. There are many ways of appreciation, salary is just one of them.
Let’s give a few tips from Harvard University to develop a culture of appreciation in the workplace:
- Saying nice words and giving small rewards (micro-bonus) to employees for their achievements will increase their motivation at work.
- If you give compliments when a job is done well, explaining what and why you like it so much, it means much more to your employees than phrases such as “Very good, great!”.
- Every person reacts differently to compliments. For example, some people are embarrassed when they receive compliments in front of their friends, while others like it very much. You should endeavour to get to know your employees in order to find the most appropriate form.
- Don’t forget the others in the team. If you want a team to work well, you shouldn’t just compliment a few people. You can find something that every employee does well.
You can fill out the corporate contact form on Muhiku.co.uk to learn about innovative corporate gift options special for your company that will motivate your employees and increase their commitment to work. You can learn how to set a budget when buying corporate gifts for companies from our blog post.
Working Together
Sustaining employee engagement is not an easy task. You need to understand how the team works and what motivates them. For this, it is very important to come together with the team and do something together. Managers with strong observation skills and strong communication with their employees will not experience lack of motivation at work.
We hope that these articles will help your office environment to be more productive and positive. As we mentioned in our post, every person is unique and motivated by different things. Managers have a lot of work to find these distinctions.
