Most of the jobs in the world depend on the people performing them. If something happens to your employee, they might not carry out their duties properly. Have your employees hit a plateau, got sloppy, or do they lack creativity in the recent weeks? Their work performance might have gotten worse, and you don’t know what happened. The reason could be simple — lack of motivation. That’s not as bad as it sounds, but you do need to do something.
Motivation is often underestimated in the business world, but it shouldn’t be — when people are inspired, they do their best to fulfill any given task to the best of their ability. In the modern world, a classical money-motivating system(1) might not be enough. What to do then?
Don’t worry. In this article, you’ll find six tips that’ll help you inspire employees. However, they’re pretty universal and simple, so if you have more specific reasons why your staff members lack to inspire employees, look for more extraordinary solutions. For example, if you have multilingual employees who live in different countries, perhaps it’s time to show them what exactly they are a part of?
Organize a company-wide, online meeting, invite a translator – for example, from LightHouse Online(2), – and let your international employees get to know one another!
The main rule is making your employees feel important. They should know what the meaning of their job is and how valued they are as members of the collective.
1. Invest in Your Employees
Yes, salaries are important, but that’s not the subject. Make sure your employees feel that you trust them by investing in their skills. Tuition reimbursement, a mentoring program, job shadowing – you can make your employees so much better in what they do by allowing them to grow.
This way, you also let them know that you care about them. Schedule periodic meetings with your employees to discuss their career paths. Make sure they stay on track and that they’re not overwhelmed by the job. Some employees may spend much of their work time on unnecessary tasks, like answering the phones when it’s not their direct job. You might want to ease their burden: for example, you can hire another employee to take over several tasks, or subscribe to an answering service, like Ivyanswer(3).
2. Set the Stretch Goals
Goals are something that can easily inspire employees, but if they’re too hard or too boring, one can easily give in to procrastination. There are two options you can use to make their goals more manageable and exciting.
First, you can create stretch goals. They are set just beyond your team’s current capability, which will make your employees want to push beyond limitations. Everybody wants to be successful! Just remember to praise the team for its growth in whichever way you see fit.
( Also Read: What is Employee Training and Development? )
3. Break Goals into Smaller Pieces
The second option is to break difficult goals into more manageable chunks. Motivation can disappear if the goal is hard to achieve, even if every member of the team loves challenges. Use a classic strategy, “divide and conquer”. Break the bigger goal into specific and realistic small ones, come up with a list of tasks to achieve them, and set the deadline. Voilà! Your employees know what to do and are ready and inspired to start working.
4. Pay Attention
Employees are regular people, not just a faceless workforce. Their daily lives can affect their productivity. You need to show concern for them: ask about their holidays, families, and interests. And make sure they know you: share your emotions and worries with them but don’t dive into deeply personal stuff.
It may seem like a waste of time and energy, but this way, you’ll know how to encourage your staff members to work and deal with any family-related issues that can impact their job. This means that if one of them is going through a tough period of their life, you make sure they do only the number of tasks they can and get all the help they need.
5. Create an Open Communication
Make sure that if your employees have problems, they can come to you. Sometimes people may not be able to finish a task because they don’t have enough data or encounter some other kind of problem. If they’re too afraid to ask you for help, nobody’s going to benefit from the situation.
Check-in with your employees, encourage them when needed, answer questions – that way, you’ll be able to troubleshoot and help your staff accomplish their tasks more effectively.
6. Make it Fun
Everybody likes to work with exciting tasks, but the monotonous job has to be accomplished too. In such a situation, try to make a work process interesting: for example, put a large cardboard thermometer on the wall, and the employees will color it red from top to bottom while they’re working on the task, to track their progress. Or search for some motivation games(4) online and customize them to your liking. We promise your employees’ motivation will spike high!
Final Thought
Lack of motivation is a real plague in the modern world, and it can negatively impact your company. While some workers might be able to deal with it themselves, others need help, and if they don’t get it, an important task may not get done on time, or, in worse situations, you may even lose a great staff member.
Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do. Pay attention to your employees, encourage them, make sure they’re not wasting time and energy on unnecessary tasks, create open communication, and invest in their career and their future. This way, you’ll create an appropriate atmosphere in the company, and your employees(1) won’t have problems focusing on their job.
