Motivate your team — Keep your employees happy and productive

People within an organization are its biggest assets. From top level management to the executive staff, each and every member has his/her own unique contribution towards the organization’s growth. Moving forward and achieving alone cannot be replaced with what you can achieve with the support of your workforce. Business owners needs to recognize that it is their workforce which makes the difference regardless of what the business sells. Though, turning your workplace a second home for your employees can be a tough job, but it’s totally worth the effort.

Let’s discuss some of the most important aspects of employee motivation for higher productivity that would help you, your employees and your business in growing. Take a look:

Motivational speeches can do wonders

As there are hundreds of things going around in the office, stress and work pressure can leave your employees demotivated. Counselling is known to be an effective way to inspire human beings for the things or goals which they fear to achieve. As a leader, you should motivate your team through inspirational speeches which helps demotivated employees regain confidence and achieve better. But always remember that motivation is not a one time drug, your employees need it on periodical basis to keep their spirits high at work.

A healthy atmosphere

Everyone loves to see beauty around and since office is the place where employees work everyday, the infrastructure should be a treat to the vision. It impacts a lot on the productivity and happiness level of the employees. Suffocating environment generates stress and lack of interest among employees. If your office space is surrounded by nature, then you can take the advantage of glass windows in-between walls so that there’s no feeling like being stuck in empty walls. Additionally, creative and pleasant colors, natural light and ambient sound are really good mood enhancers.

Be flexible

Research has shown that each and every individual has his own productivity time. Some show greater capacity in the morning, while others give maximum productivity during night. Not only timing, but the type of work an employee is doing should be considered carefully. Why to make someone design a web store when he/she is meant for development. Napoleon Hill truly said that “Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.”

Trust and value your employees

Before everything else, having the confidence that your employees are skilled and trustworthy, is important. Spare them some space so that they can do their jobs by themselves. However, to make sure that they are on right track, you can plan review meetings on periodical basis. This creates a win-win situation. Further, giving respect to your employees’ individual diversity can help them perceive that they are valued and which shall inspire them to bring more commitment towards work. Offer your employees the support and guidance they need when issues arise. However, supporting them doesn’t mean to do their job, rather it is to understand the problem and suggest them a few ways to get it fixed.

Conduct a survey — Open communication

Knowing what your employees think and want is crucial. Encourage them to share their views about work, office infrastructure, environment and everything else. You can arrange one-on-one meetings or simply ask them to fill online feedback forms. It is a way to improve and moderate several facets of your work area and environment. Further, try to keep communication as open as possible, because when communication is closed, there are more chances of blame games, frustrations and misinterpretations among team members.

Offer employee incentive programs and career growth

Nothing else can be more motivating than a few well-chosen words of appreciation. Rewarding your employees with monetary remuneration and recognition for good performance, contribution and participation keeps them inspired to stay with the organisation. Try to figure out what drives each member of the organization and offer benefits accordingly. Additionally, training and personality development programs can be a good growth opportunity for the employees and helps them to get their jobs done more effectively.

Make sure your teams are connected

Whether your whole office is working together in a single formal office or your employees are distributed around different geographical locations, ensure that they have efficient communication channels to get connected. Because there are lots of things to be discussed and shared about, and that every single detail matters a lot, it is important to keep everyone updated with the project information. Virtual teams can benefit from online collaboration tools that let teams connect within a few mouse clicks.

Upgrade your IT infrastructure

Upgrading your company’s infrastructure according to the latest hardware and software trends can help them cope up with the counterparts, and thus deliver better results. When employees have to wait for minutes to get their systems started, it negatively impacts their productivity and thus your business. Adhering to traditional disparate tools can result in lots of time wastage and clutter, for example email and excel sheets. You can use a collaboration software that acts as a central hub for all activities related to projects. So there’s no need to switch between 10 tools to find one file.

Cut down frequent meetings

One of the major reasons for low employee productivity is frequent and result-less meetings. From minutes to hours, such meetings eats up constructive hours of the employees. If we take 4 people in an hour of meeting, then 4 hours of productivity gets consumed. Gathering together in a physical meeting room can be better replaced by an online collaboration tools, where team members can share ideas and information in real-time, over the internet. This saves a lot of time.

Switch from meaningless strategies

Every business follows one or more strategies to achieve goals, but that doesn’t mean to stick with the traditional approach, saying that ‘This is how we have always done it’. Listen to your workforce and consider what they are suggesting you. The way your employees want to get things done might be much better than the way you’ve been doing it. So listen, consider and then decide.

The bottom line is that…

The happier your employees are, the more productive they would be at work. Improvement in your employees’ productivity depends upon your ability to offer them the opportunities to do so.