Employee Motivation

1. Build a Motivated Work Place

As a Manager it is important to know why your employees would want to be motivated by you. If you have the answer to this question, you will find yourself better equipped to engage your employees and influence their behaviors that in turn will make them more enthusiastic to do their job at hand well. Secondly, to recognize that motivation is intrinsic. Each employee draws his/her motivation from within and external factors like work environment, recognition, pay checks, bonuses etc only affect/ influence that intrinsic motivation. Thirdly, it is imperative for every manager to inspire employees to be their best, to take risks and unleash the limitless potential each one of the have.

2. What Drives People

Managers need to primarily know what drives the employees. It is important to put people in jobs that help them meet their individual needs while doing their work/job and that will reward you with a bunch of motivated employees who will perform their best and that will benefit the organisation. As a manager it is imperative to appreciate every employee is unique that their uniqueness should be recognized and each employee should be treated accordingly. Because each one is unique his/her drive/ motivation is unique too. It is hence necessary to shift gears and manage them uniquely too. Once you know as a manager what drives each employee, you can use that to make their work more fulfilling and merging their individual needs to those of the organisation by providing them work that meets their individual needs.

3. Employees Do It For Themselves

As a manager, if you aim to influence the employees’ motivation, you have to first understand their reason for doing things. Employees are not truly energized or motivated by your reasons. They need to know what is in it for them. If you can help them connect their personal goals to those of the organizations, it will affect each employees’ performance on the job that they do. It will benefit immensely if you are successful in setting up an approach that promotes personal and purpose for every employee. As a Manager when you emphasize personal growth and development as a tool to influence employees’ motivation, you help them maximize their productivity and help them impact organisation achievement in a positive manner.

4. Encourage Intelligent Risk Taking

It is important to remind the employees the benefits of intelligent risk taking, it is critical to encourage risk taking behavior as a learned behavior. The more risk they learn to take over time the greater those risks become and if they are coached well to take intelligent risks it becomes easier over a period of time and the pay offs are sure to benefit the organisation and you as a manager.

5. Show the people the Larger Business Environment

As an Influential Manager, it is your responsibility to help employees understand the organization, its finances, operation mechanisms, competition environment, innovative thinking to name a few of the facets. It is important to share with the employees about the organizations, the strategic perspectives rather than just about how to do their jobs or complete their assignments. As an effective manager, you will stand to gain immensely if you aim to develop smarter, more skilled and highly motivated employees who shoulder stretched targets and impact the organisation overall performance. To achieve this, sharing the larger business context and its nuances is mandatory. This will also foster more ownership behavior among the employees. So, share the financial dashboards, operational efficiency indices etc with your employees.

6. Make Employees Feel Like Partners

The Best Managers make their employees feel like Partners in the organisation rather than mere team members. Why do they do so? because when employees feel the ownership of something, they care for it more and work for its betterment, often to achieve the best. It is a defining quality of a good manager to encourage entrepreneurial thinking among the employees, explain how the business is run and help employees feel as if they own the business. The transformation in your thinking as a manager increases the employees’ movement from an employee to a partner in the business.

7. Know Your Competition

Competitive environment energizes employees and when they who and what they are competing against, their motivation levels automatically rises. It is great tool to bring people together and make them perform at higher levels than its competitors that in turn help the organisation grow. As a Manager you will stand to gain if you help employees to compete in the market by showing them how to compete by teaching them to learn more about the industry and stay abreast with the current developments in the market place. You may nominate employees to track competition data, circulate competition analysis reports, creating a learning repository of competition success factors etc. Being an effective manager, you may want to induce the culture of knowing the competition and constantly striving to measure up against them and better the organisation dashboards.

8. Nurture creative and innovative thinking

The big leap in any group performance happens as a result of a breakthrough in the collective thought process. The Big idea gives rise to novel actions that impact organisation results and growth and that takes them to a different dimension. It is a key responsibility of the manager to nurture innovative and creative thinking in each employee by using tools like brainstorming, ideation sessions, investigation of innovative and creative ideas, experiment creative and innovation solutions at work etc. Continuously emphasizing the positive aspects of creative solution finding and advantages of innovation approach to work will help foster the culture of innovative and creative thinking among the employees.

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