How to motivate and inspire your employees?
In these new millennials working world a lot have changed, the old ways of handling and keeping employees are no longer the same and some leaders or business owners find it difficult to retain millennials in their company. There is also a time when bosses or managers are at work, some employees will work extra hard or “pretend” to be working extra hard so as to earn a good appraisal but when the bosses or managers are not around, they tend to slack down and do things slower or less important things. So, how do you keep your employees stay motivated and inspired?
In this article, I will be sharing some tested and proven tips and bits of advice you can do in your office to motivate and inspire your employees. I will make these tips and advice actionable where you can apply them easily but if you have any question do feel free to drop me an email and I will answer them accordingly.
- Start off every Monday with a weekly meeting, not more than 1 hour (depending on the size of your company/ department).
The most important day of the week is also the most “blue” day called Monday Blue, it is a bad culture in the world! Align everyone in your company with the target or goals that each person or each department have to achieve by the end of the week. If you have a big goal, as a leader of the company, your task is to break down the big goal into small achievable goals. You may ask, how do you define small achievable goals? The answer is fairly simple, ask your employees if it is achievable or based on your understanding of your employees give the task to them. Planned your weekly meeting with agendas so everything can be done within an hour, structurally. If you need a free template to help you to plan an agenda this will help you.
Throughout the week, if your employees faced any issue, do not hesitate to talk to them arrange a 1-2-1 session with them over a cup of coffee and find out the issue. You may take a look at this article on how to have a productive 1-2-1 session. Communicate more through face-to-face interaction instead of communicating through texts. Most miscommunication comes from texts and email as spoken words only contain 7% in personnel communication whereas 55% is from body language.
- Find out what motivates your employees.
Everybody is different, you cannot have a 1 size fit all motivation and expect it will work with everyone. Do you know what motivates your employees to get out of bed every morning? Do you know what are they passionate about – their personal goals, interests, and aspiration? A great leader knows their people well and is interested in them. If a leader is able to look through that, a leader can then help to create that future for them. A captain of a ship must know each sailor and their skill set in order to propel the ship in the right direction and reach the correct destination. You can’t ask a cook to check the radar.
In order to know your people well, you need to set aside time to have a conversation with them and be interested in their lives. If you are too busy, get the next commander-in-chief to do that for you. That being said, the result works best if a leader can do it personally. Imagine the president of your country come and know you more as a friend.
- Praise and compliment them more instead of criticizing them
Humans loved to be praised, no human being will say “I don’t like to be recognized for the work I had done”. Leaders, bosses, managers have to start learning and get into the habits of praising and complimenting employees. This will boost their confidence and morale, they will be more committed to their work. A study done by Gallup said that “employees who received praise for doing good work perform better”
Recently we helped a company with receiving praise from each other, I am actually quite touched by the things they did for each other. Sometimes we may overlook a simple gesture and take it for granted, simply thanking a person can actually go a long way in making a good day for that person. You can also try removing “thank you” to “I am grateful for you”.
TIP: Praising and complimenting can be one of the agendas during the weekly meeting.
- Reward
How do you reward your employees when they outperformed themselves or constantly helping the company to improve? These are the few ways that you can reward them:
i. Monetary reward
ii. Vouchers
iii. Plaques
iv. Gift
v. 1 day off
Do exercise these with caution as well, you do not want to make it into a point where they only work hard for these rewards. These should be an incentive that recognized their extra effort put in. Not every single thing must have a reward, choose your rewarding point carefully.
- Make challenges into a game (if possible)
If possible, make any form of challenges into a game-like activity. For example, clearing up your desk and keeping the surroundings clean can be boring but yet fun if employees can challenge each other by who has the cleanest work area. Challenge employees to hit the target before the timeline set will be given a free meal by other colleagues etc. Think of creative ways to help make work exciting! Millennials get bored easily especially doing repetitive work. It will be extremely helpful to incorporate some form of games into work, this will help to motivate them.
- Empower them
Empowering employees doesn’t mean throw everything to them and expect them to finish it. You should be trusting them that they will do a good job without you being involved. As a leader of the company, you should know the standard of your team and assigned those tasks, projects that are within their means and capability. Trust that they will do the right thing and that right thing may not be what you are expecting, this is empowerment. In the event, if things turn south, remember the third point mentioned above. Do not blame them, or push the blame but thank them for the hard work put in. Do not use the word “why” but use the word “how”. “Why did you not do this” comparing with “How about doing this?” The usage of our words can help to encourage a person or demoralize a person.
- Activities
Plan an outing frequently to motivate your team, it can be as simple as having a good meal together at a round table. Chit chat with one another, find out more about their lives and you can use this time to share the vision or the goal that you want to do or achieve. When human’s emotion is high, the tendency of them agreeing with you and fight for you will be higher. When was the last time you engage a company to do team building for your team? Perhaps this is a good time to think of having different activities together as a company. If your company is big, consider having department team building activities or a few departments coming together to do various activities. You can have a physical activity or a more relaxing activity.
What are the physical activities?
i. Laser Tag
ii. Archery Tag
iii. Inflatable Snooker
iv. Bubble Soccer
v. Escape Room
vi. Hado Singapore
vii. Trampoline park
viii. Superpark
ix. VR game
What are relaxing activities?
i. 3D pen craft workshop
ii. Resin art workshop
iii. Flower arrangement workshop
iv. Terrarium workshop
x. Leather making workshop
xi. Dessert making workshop
xii. Magic workshop
Try applying these into your company and watch your team grow!
Cheers.