Employee engagement and motivation is a tough and complex task for every business owner. You may be passionately devoted to your business. Additionally, you might have a raging entrepreneurial fire blazing deep within, which motivates you to push yourself to the limits.
However, this may not always be the case with your employees. In a 2015 survey of SHRM revealed that only 69% of all employees questions stated they believed they were consistently chipping in all their efforts in their professional duties. You may employ numerous incentives, but are still facing the detrimental effects of low motivation in your organization. Fortunately, you are not alone. In such circumstances, even a first-rate manager is thinking out of the box to obtain dependable means of motivating his or her employees. Well, should you be in such a fix, here are tips on motivating and engaging employees that you can give a try.
1. Set small practical business objectives
Given, you have lofty ambitions for your business, but it can greatly help if you set smaller, achievable objectives on your way to the ultimate prize. This is one of the surest means of how to keep employees engaged and motivated in a stress-free manner. Instead of expecting to make a billion in one fiscal year, why not concentrate on obtaining 50 new clients each week? Doing this shows your staff you are a practical boss and not simply a ‘slave driver.’ Then realize objective, reward your employees with appropriate incentives. This will motivate them to push themselves to the limits.
2. Be transparent in all your business operations
Another technique on how to keep employees motivated is enforcing utmost transparency in your organization. Always be open to your staff on exactly what is occurring at the highest echelons of your business. This completely does away with any nasty surprises and maintains your staff’s trust. Ensure that everyone can openly ask questions and provide feedback, without risking retributions. This will make them feel more influential in critical business operations and involved in making major decisions. It will also allow them to be fully devoted to the direction you wish your company to take. Put in another way, such methods to motivate employees help in fostering company loyalty and pride.
3. Discover what drives each of your employees
Learning some tricks help you to understand what makes employees be motivated. Take your time to inquire what they love working on and what they don’t. This will permit you to fully discern and appreciate their personal career objectives. After doing this, you should then set to work to promote their professional growth in whatever way you can. Conduct one-to-one meetings, where you can listen to their business ideas in terms of what they wish to obtain from their work. Also, always uphold their personal schedules, and never put their objectives and timelines against each other.
4. Be courteous and enforce an open-door policy in your business
One of the best ways of employee engagement lies in been courteous to all your staff. It is remarkable how simple words like ‘thank you’ or ‘please’ can have a positive effect on employee motivation. Speak to all in the manner which you yourself would want to be spoken to. At all cost, always be willing to listen seriously to their complaints and apprehensions. When your employees feel their voice is consequential, they will go about their duties with total confidence. What this really means is they will have loftier stakes, than simply obtaining their paychecks.
5. Create employee engagement system based on feedback
One of the most known practice of employee motivation is the rewarding of the best performers. Liaise with all your departmental heads to reward a member of staff who performs their duties exemplary. Whoever, gains more praise on, say, a monthly basis should be given a suitable reward or recognition. This way, you can introduce some positive energy in the workplace. While still been able to retain top talent in your organization.
6. Motivate individually rather than collectively
If your organization’s operations are team-based, employee engagement in business can be more effective at the individual level. Aligned incentives can be the only fail safe means of making sure everybody in the team is working for the common cause. Introducing such strategies through multiple methods guarantees each stakeholder has a precise comprehension of how working together benefits them individually. When you adopt that strategy in, say, sales employees will permit them to achieve excellent results in their duties.
7. Integrate a good scheduling and attendance software into your operations
Finally, having an intuitive scheduling and attendance software, like the ones we offer such as event scheduling software or employee time tracking software online, will ensure you regulate your operations more efficiently. This lets you plan in advance on the exact duties, you want to assign to your staff to enhance optimal productivity and keep them motivated.