A business cannot be run by you alone. Even if you don’t have any employees, there will always be many people involved that would influence the success or failure of your business. Your vendors, suppliers, service providers are some of them. In order to keep everything running smoothly and improve upon it, we need to keep everyone involved highly motivated.
It pays to keep all parties associated with your business motivated. This ensures that everyone gets involved in offering new ideas for the growth of your business and implementing them. A motivated employee is an asset that helps an organization to maintain and improve their productivity. There are several business motivation strategies to keep your employees and other involved parties motivated to achieve your business goals.
Rewards:
Everyone works for money. Your employees will be keener to put in extra effort if they know their efforts will be rewarded. Your business success is dependent on their efforts and they will be motivated to achieve it if that success translates into some monetary reward for them. These rewards would be performance-based, which means you are not paying for them, the employee’s extra efforts to achieve them will compensate for the cost of it and more.
A rewards system must be incorporated in every organization. It needs to be multifaceted to include all of the parties involved in carrying out the business. Rewarding only the sales guys to find client for your business or to achieve sales figures won’t give you consistent results for long term. A reward should be significant, it can be anything, bonus, promotion, gift card, shares but it should justify the efforts put in to achieve it.
Employee suggestions:
Being heard, being able to contribute, having a say in a matter makes them feel important. Hence keeps them motivated. If all the involved parties feel that their inputs being taken in deciding the company’s fortune they will be more emotionally connected with the company’s success. Allow your employees, consultants, suppliers to provide their ideas openly. Even reward some for the best ideas or suggestions. Keep the suggestion box easily available. Read out the ideas you like to everyone. Give them credit for their ideas. This keeps all the parties involved highly motivated and will also help you in decision making.
Empowerment:
Employees become experts about their everyday tasks. They can do it better than anybody else in the company. There is no need to keep monitoring and correcting them every minute. They don’t need managerial supervision at every step. You should give your employees some authority over their everyday job. This will help you in two ways. First, the employees will be motivated as they get a feel of authority and hence, they will be more productive than ever. And second, you don’t need to waste your resources on micromanagement.
Not all employees are similar. New employees, unskilled employees may require regular supervision but others can do better without it. An empowered employee will show initiative to modify the way they perform their duties in order to be more efficient. With proper training empowerment of employees can be a very useful business motivation strategy.
Job rotation:
The most common reason other than salary raise for employee attrition is lack of value addition. Employees keep going through the same tasks day in and day out, after a few years they reach a condition of burnout. They learn almost everything there is to learn about their tasks, they get experts in it and eventually, they get bored doing it. To improve upon it before the employee gets bored of his job you can redesign his responsibilities.
You can get creative in this process. You can either assign a different job altogether on a temporary basis or you can add, remove or alter some among his current responsibilities. You can also give some employees some additional authority. These changes done strategically on a regular basis will keep them motivated and involved in the process.
Flexibility:
Work-life balance is the most valuable motivating factor for employees. Thus, they choose to work for and perform better at the organizations that offer some flexibility in working hours and locations. Employees seem to be more motivated to work towards achieving organizational goals if they are offered flexible working time instead of a tight nine to six schedule.
Further being flexible you can offer an option of the compressed workweek to your employees. That means instead of forty-hour five day week you can offer four days forty-hour week to some employees. You can offer some employees an option to work part-time when they are not able to give a full day. In some cases, you can allow employees to work partially or fully from home or any other remote location. Such flexibility will reduce distractions and give them more freedom that will result in more productivity.
Education support:
Irrespective of their age and experience all employees wish to grow and develop their professional skills. As a business owner, you should provide opportunities and support for employees to further their formal, vocational education. Other than long term education you can also help them with short term internal and external training. This will allow employees to achieve their full potential and their improved skills will help your business grow faster. This also shows to the employee that you care about their growth and keep them motivated.
For any organization their employees, partners should come first, even before the customers. If you value them it will show in their efforts. Motivated employees are more likely to stand up if the business goes through rough times. A motivated workforce results in more productivity increased sales and better customer service. The above strategies will work wonders in motivating your employees. But as a business owner, you must always be ready to determine new ways to motivate your employees. Conduct surveys, understand what your employees value the most and work towards the betterment of your current strategies to keep them motivated. You can also some of these things on yourself to be motivated to keep doing the business with vigor.