Managing and Motivating to Increase Engagement
Motivation
Empower your employees. Put them in the driver's seat and watch them excel beyond what you can imagine. Showing employees that you have faith in them and their skills is a huge step in building trust. Involving them in the decision making process can be the first step after which you can start to give them complete responsibility over certain aspects of the job.
Having autonomous employees is every manager’s dream. One way to breed that in your team is by encouraging a sense of leadership and ownership when it comes to their work. Motivate your team to come up with unique ideas, to pitch new creative solutions to you and to feel confident enough to make tough calls. Show them you have faith in their capabilities and they will reward you with unparalleled performance.
Taking the time to recognize employees' efforts and achievements is a crucial part of a manager’s role. No one wants to feel like their efforts went unnoticed. Celebrate their achievements and always give honest compliments when they are due. When they fail, which they inevitably will at some point, be there to pat them on the back. Highlight their efforts and guide them on how to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
If your experience allows you to foresee a mistake or failure down the line that your employee is unaware of then take the time to discuss their strategy and bring your concerns to the table. Never watch an employee make a mistake as a learning technique. This will surely backfire and might lead to distrust.
Setting up a rewards system will ensure that your employees are constantly motivated and energized to keep pushing forward. It is important to focus on non-monetary rewards as well as profit based ones. You can create a system of giving people half days off or a small gift or gift card to the cafeteria. Any small reward will make your employees feel appreciated which is key to enhancing their performance.
Managing
A successful manager understands that employees are very different individuals with different needs and unique working styles. Recognize those differences as strengths not weaknesses. A diverse team performs well. Learning how to motivate each employee in a way that makes them click is a skill worth spending time and effort on. There is no one size fits all when it comes to dealing with people. You can’t use the same strategy with all your employees. It simply will not work. Learn to get your message across in the manner that resonates with each employee. Basically speak their language!
Staying in touch with your employees can enhance your working relationship. No one said meetings have to take place in dull conference rooms with projectors and PowerPoint presentations. Whenever possible, schedule a casual coffee meet-up with your team to stay up to date with their tasks and projects while building a healthy and strong relationship. Coffee meetings are one of many employee engagement activities in the office, but it’s not the only one! It’s important to be creative when it comes to office engagement ideas.
On a deeper level, giving your team a sense of purpose is key to intrinsically motivating them. Periodically demonstrating how their tasks and roles reflect on the company as a whole and how their contributions affect the image and performance of the company is a relatively easy and engaging way to maintain their level of enthusiasm. Communicating clear and realistic expectations gives no room to misunderstandings and unnecessary mistakes.
Have frequent check-in meetings with each team member to eliminate any misunderstandings early on and ensure that everyone is on the same path. This is an excellent way to stay in contact with your team and maintain a professional work environment.
Don’t ignore the obvious
Pay your employees well! While monetary compensation is not enough to keep employees motivated, none of the above tips matter if they are underpaid. Nothing shows employees how much the company appreciates their work as much as paying them fairly.
People are oftentimes uncomfortable around money related topics, but it is important to highlight the realities of the situation. Everyone needs to provide for themselves and their families. If you underpay your employees, you are signing your company up for disloyal and stressed human assets who will leave you at the first chance they get.
Remember!
It is incredibly important as a manager to remember that your employees’ motivation will ebb and flow throughout the year. It is a perfectly normal and natural part of the process and in many cases unavoidable. The sooner you come to terms with this, the easier your workplace interactions are going to be.
Do not judge an employee by their low periods but rather be supportive and understanding of the nature of humans. No one can maintain the same level of motivation and dedication year-round. Knowing and understanding the variable seasonality that your employees go through can be beneficial in this case.
What influences an employee’s performance and focus can be a myriad of factors. Whether you look at conventional fluctuations during the year such as holidays (Easter, Christmas, New Year…etc.) or diving deeper into the individual changes such as big milestones in an employee’s personal life (Marriage, divorce, loss of a parent or a child, birth of a child, financial issues, loss of a pet…etc.); all the above situations are completely natural and should be accounted for as part of the normal workflow. While it might sound like a cliché, waiting it out is sometimes the best strategy you can adopt.
High stress periods will mean something different for different companies and occasionally for different departments within the same company. It also completely depends on the field and line of work, so this is totally up to you to monitor and determine. It will be beneficial to highlight those periods and prepare for them ahead of time. Whether by briefing your team on what to expect or by making sure every employee has the right amount of workload so you don’t leave anyone drowning in work when things get stressful. Predicting and preparing for those high demand times will work in your favor when everyone on your team has the right expectations and is trained on how to deal with those situations.
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