There are many ways of motivating employees at work. The most significant one is to enriching job quality and engaging with employees. One of the reasons why people become unmotivated at work is the nature of the jobs they do every day. If the job is not challenging and very predictable, most employees will just take it as a daily routine – but not a fulfilling job.
Importance of Motivating Employees and Job Enrichment
For many employees, simply having a job, regardless of its quality is not enough. They want high-quality jobs that can trigger their enthusiasms, drive, interest, and keep them focused on the performance goal.
Employee motivation is important because it creates a culture of engagement in the workplace. So, as a manager, you need to keep enriching jobs and make them more challenging, but interesting and engaging to keep your team motivated by using the ideas below:
1. Turn Daily Routines into Projects
Turn some of the daily work activities into small projects and then divide your staff members into small project teams. The idea is to give each team member the opportunity to work within a project team during their working time, from start to finish.
This will make their work more meaningful and purposeful. It will also give them the opportunity to develop other skills that may not have been developed in their usual routines.
2. Growth and Learning
Energize the team and stimulate their motivation. Most employees work harder in an environment that provides an opportunity to learn and develop their personal skills.
Therefore, you need to lead your team with that in mind and structure their jobs in a way that creates the continual development of opportunities for them to grow career further.
3. Job Autonomy and Responsibility
Give team members the opportunity to make decisions or engage in functions usually done by you. Let them get involved in goal setting, making decisions about their own work and where to use the resources available.
This will empower them to take on more responsibility for complex problem-solving. They will also be motivated to set themselves very challenging, but achievable performance goals. With this, you are creating a self-managing team and enhancing individual team member’s sense of ownership, purpose, and responsibility.
4. Pay Attention to Individuals
You’ve to be consistent in the way you deal with team members. This means treating them as individuals.
If someone in your team is a hard worker and performs better, you must reward the person for their exceptional contribution.
If you ignore your best workers and choose to reward the worst performers, you are sending a message to the others that the better they perform, the less recognition they get from you.
Also read: How to Give Feedback to Team Members
5. Spend time with the Team
Spend time with team members and try to understand what challenges and barriers they’re facing. This is one of the ways of knowing their working environment.
If they feel uninspired find out why? Find out what frustrates them? What needs changing? You’ll get to the bottom of what demotivates them. Then make informed decisions that can put the energy and enthusiasm back into their working environment.
6. Reverse Mentoring
Reverse mentoring is a form of mentoring in which your staff members will become your mentors. They will share their knowledge, new trends, concepts, or new technological developments with you. This brings different benefits to you and the team in the end.
Usually, people think about mentoring as it’s only for the manager to mentor team members. Mentoring your team members is an excellent way of enhancing their skills and lift their motivation.
But there are things managers struggle with every day at work. For instance, most of us struggle to use computer-based technologies, social media, and the internet in general.
However, you’ll find that certain individuals in your team are very skillful and competent using the same things you’re struggling with. What you need to do is to ask for their help.
They will feel happy to assist, coach, or train you. And the benefits can be far-reaching. You’ll acquire new skills, while the mentor or team member becomes energized, confident, and motivated from the mentoring experience.
7. Peer-to-Peer Feedback
Arrange a regular monthly team-talk totally demoted to peer feedback. Encourage your staff members to observe one another for the purpose of giving themselves feedback.
Staff-to staff feedback stimulates attention and can hit home quickly. Often, team members get shocked when they hear what their colleagues say about them.
This type of feedback is particularly more meaningful because your staff members know more about what their colleagues do, feel, experiencing, and accomplishing than their manager.
It energizes them when they find out that their own contribution affects the team’s overall performance one way or the other.
8. Set-up an Issue-solving Team
Every workplace has its own issues, and concerns that need attention, but never adequately dealt with. Set up a problems-solving team to analyze their root cause, and resolve them. Find those issues that have slid down the priority list, but still need to be dealt with and hand them over to the problems-solving team.
This is an excellent way to get people who are feeling demotivated at work to take on new energizing, and sometimes the most complex challenges.
9. Regular Monthly Lunch With the Team
There are many things you should know but don’t about your team. If you really want to know what is inside them, organize a regular monthly lunch catch-up with your staff members. It’s a great opportunity for discussing, listening, asking questions about team morale in a free and relaxed environment.
During the lunch catch-up, find out what they want, but aren’t getting from you. Also, try to understand what they don’t want from you. Then, clarify their points, but don’t explain or defend yourself.
Your people will feel that you care and then become energized to work harder. For you, this approach allows you to get their critical viewpoints and start the process of dealing with those issues.
10. Send Personalised Emails
Write glowing emails and send them to each member of the team. Personalize the emails, and put their individual names before the text you write.
Emphasize the significance of your employees by using positive language. For example in the email subject line use word such as “YOU ARE GREAT.” Also, close your writing emphasizing how very grateful you feel. Make sure you add your name, title, and your telephone number at the end before you send it.
Another useful article: Outrageous Things Managers do that Destroy Trust in the Workplace
11. Designate a parking space
Having a designated parking spot can make people feel special and the need to work harder to maintain it. If you have a unique person in your team and owns a car, look at the work parking situation and select a spot for the outstanding member of the team.
Paint the spot with special colored lines that distinguishes it from others. Put the person’s name onto the sign that denotes the parking spot and prominently indicate that, it’s reserved for a special person.
There are more motivating Ideas that can motivate your employees to higher levels of performance.
Team Motivating Ideas:
- Write a monthly newsletter with personal stories
- Create a Team notice board with who’s who
- Have a Pump it up a week
- List the top 10 things your employees would like to happen
- Make humorous certificates of recognition
- Set standards and display current performance
- Give everyone a notebook to record suggestions, ideas, and concerns
- Get T-shirts made for the team
- Make a team video on your part of the business
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