To ensure that your company is vibrant and efficient, the high morale of your staff is crucial. However, unlike the productivity of your work or even staff satisfaction, it’s hard to measure and evaluate motivation. Still, motivation is what ensures high productivity and satisfaction, so the best way to monitor it is by using tangible performance indicators and ensuring that they’re not dropping.
Motivation is a constant process, requiring a strategy and various approaches to track employees’ needs and inspire them to work better without burning out
In the modern world, where a large part of the work is connected to the Internet, corporate management software is an important part of the company’s internal processes. They automatize many processes and organize all work activities flawlessly. For example, CleverLMS is a learning management tool that you may easily leverage for motivational purposes. It has interactive features, a rating and badges system, and a gift store where you may provide employees with rewards for efficient work and learning.
Let’s start with the motivation essentials and continue with various strategies and approaches,
Staff motivation essentials
Let’s start by defining the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation types and then overview the difference between positive and negative staff motivation.
- Intrinsic motivation is the inner desire of one to complete the job. It’s deeply emotional and psychological, emerging from personal interests, desires, and expectations. For example, one will gladly complete something which deeply touches one and the desire to be the best in some activity will also motivate one to work with it greatly.
- Extrinsic, or outer motivation, is when someone does their work knowing that they’ll obtain something for that. It’s mostly a social thing, being interconnected with other people and the opportunities they provide. Examples are good rewards, such as money and promotions, recognition by others, and various new opportunities for self-realization.
Positive and negative motivation are different in methods: let’s overview both.
- Positive motivation uses positive reinforcement, such as growth opportunities, self-realization, support, and increased salary. It’s based on the fact that one will be happy to complete the job for which you’ll obtain a good reward.
- Negative motivation uses unpleasant influences to make employees do something. Examples are threats to fire them, various fines, and demotions. It’s based on another fact: you will do the work knowing that, in other cases, you’ll suffer from unemployment or a lack of money.
Negative motivation is unsustainable, as it worsens connections between you and your employees and limits them. While it’s helpful to utilize clear boundaries and deadlines and ensure that your workers align with them, putting excessive pressure and threatening them will only worsen problems in the long term. Instead, speak with them to understand why they are demotivated and what they actually want.
Scholarly articles, like this one from Taiwanese scientists, prove that work autonomy and the feeling of being connected improve work motivation greatly.
So we’ll focus on positive motivation here, exploring various ways to motivate staff and tools that may be used to facilitate it. As mentioned, there are external and intrinsic motivations, and a good manager can use both to ensure that employees work steadily and efficiently.
The benefits of staff motivation are not only greater performance and competitiveness but also improved employees’ well-being. If your people know what they’re doing and why, what they’ll obtain for that, and that they’re secured, you may be sure that your company’s performance will increase greatly. For example, a salesperson will likely sell much more goods being released from the constant pressure and motivated by the knowledge that they’re selling something really important for the world.
Ideas, strategies, and approaches
Let’s now discuss several staff motivation ideas that are a good place to start when creating a plan for improving your team’s morale. We’ll address only a bit of them, enabling you to continue this list and ideate by yourself based on your own experience.
- Measure the motivation level as precisely as possible, using criteria such as employee satisfaction, work performance, revenues, and staff turnover.
- Recognize and reward the successes of your employees and always support them in case of failures.
- Provide flexible work schedules, prioritizing task completion, not just work time.
- Provide well-being programs, such as emotional support and various recreational activities.
- Provide education opportunities to improve employees’ skills and ensure their self-realization.
- Explore the company’s mission and central idea, think about their importance for the world, and evaluate how your employees are dedicated to them.
Staff motivation strategies emerge from these ideas and provide the background for your further plans. You can choose the one which is the best fit or combine several of them.
- Gradualism strategy is based on the gradual introduction to new tasks and work processes, ensuring that your employees have enough time to become familiar with them.
- Complexity strategy combines various techniques and approaches based on clear goals that the company should achieve. It’s especially good for multi-team collaboration,
- Accessibility strategy focuses on equal access for all tools and work processes, ensuring their transparency. It’s good for international remote teams, where each member performs their own task but is equally involved in the work process.
- Timeliness strategy prioritizes the usage of schedules and deadlines to organize the work process and create clear boundaries in which employees will perform their tasks. It’s best suited for specific projects with clear deadlines and tangible results.
Lastly, based on the mentioned ideas and strategies, we’ll elucidate several specific staff motivation techniques to deploy in your work. They’ll work both for your team members and yourself.
- Organize educational activities to improve productivity.
- Provide feedback to your employees regularly.
- Ensure transparency of work processes and equal access to all relevant information.
- Organize flexible schedules and set deadlines based on the company’s actual needs.
- Nurture intrinsic motivation by providing work autonomy and allocating work according to employees’ interests and desires.
Now that you know about primary techniques and approaches to improve work motivation, inspiration, and morale, let’s summarize them in several staff motivation tips.
Summary: Several tips
- Set smart goals for your employees and colleagues. It means that they should be achievable, fixed in time, and challenging enough to remain engaging and efficient.
- Set clear expectations, so everyone knows what they should do and why.
- Set clear schedules and deadlines for tasks and meetings, making sure that everyone knows about them.
- Provide regular feedback regarding all your employees’ work and let them provide their own feedback, initiating meaningful communications.
- Reward the accomplishments of your employees so they’ll understand that they’re important and their work will be paid well.
- Track problems and issues in workflows, make them visible to everyone and empower team members to solve them.
- Provide emotional support to all team members in the form which is the best fit for them. It’ll improve your relations and greatly increase their satisfaction and productivity.
- Use various interactive activities to make the work process engaging.
Lastly, don’t forget to use staff motivation tools, such as learning management systems, to track employee progress, improve their skills, and automatize all processes mentioned above!
Conclusion
Your company relies on various methods to motivate staff, as motivation is the main driver for its performance, staff satisfaction, and competitiveness. While your staff’s competency represents how your company will accomplish your idea, their morale shows whether it’ll actually do this. To enhance this crucial driver of your organization, nurture the intrinsic motivation in your workers based on their interests, desires, and personal expectations. In addition, create a vibrant, transparent, and supportive work environment where external motivation will also be high.
You can utilize learning management systems, such as CleverLMS, to organize the platform for your teams where they can improve their skills and be in constant connection. Here, you’ll track their progress and assign tasks easily via such a platform, saving you a lot of time and nerves. Together with the deployment of a good set of strategies and approaches, your company’s motivational driver will remain strong!