Employee motivation (Intrinsic motivation) can be one of the challenging tasks for an effective Manager; it needs continuous efforts and inter-personal skills in order to truly motivate your employees or a team of resources as motivation doesn’t last long.
Keeping your employees organized at work can be achieved through a process-oriented approach, but getting employees engaged at work and evolving a sense of interest in employees at work requires different level of skills and efforts.
Motivation Generates Quality:
Motivation drives quality of work, no matter how much talented or skillful your employees are but without true motivation they cannot produce quality work at regular intervals. For an effective manager creating quality work is an excellence, now the definition of quality work various depending to job role and industry.
Is it a One-Time Job?
Motivation is not a one-time job, it needs continuous efforts and requires re-evaluation after a while with time. With the changes in employees’ life (lifestyle) or level of maturity or experience; factors that motivates an employee are most likely to change, so an effective manager needs to keep re-evaluating these factors that can help his/her employees motivated at work.
There may be many tips and tricks for a manager to help achieve employee motivation, but I’m just putting some of them based on my experience.
1- Share the BIG picture
Sharing the BIG picture with employees help them visualize how they are contributing to organization goals. Obviously not all employees can grasp it clearly but that doesn’t mean that managers hide the BIG perspective from employees or teams. To perform better employees need clear correlation between their efforts and objectives (success) of organization.
This doesn’t mean that Managers keeps on discussing the BIG picture in each and every team meeting with employees; it just needs to be shared with employees but not a recursive topic as it will de-track them from short-term goals or project milestones.
2- Discuss Combined goals and achievements as a team
After organizational goals, managers should also discuss team goals and achievements with employees; to clarify where they all stand as a unit (team).
Not all employees perform same; every employee has it’s own capacity and motivation level that drives him/her at work. That is why to effectively manage employees in a team instead of selecting an individual employee’s failure, managers should discuss failures as generic as possible in a group discussion or team meeting. In addition to this replacing the words like “I“, “You” with “We” really helps in communication with struggling team members.
3- Focus on leadership by setting examples, instead of micro-management
Due to time-constrains, when results are not coming up as expected some Managers switches to micro-management mode to control efforts of employees. To me micro-management is not an efficient way of dealing with situations; rather it can bring long-term effects and dis-satisfaction in employees.
Micro-management brings negative impacts and restricts an employees growth as well, spending more time with employees and inspire them with leadership and initiating of sense competition among employees is a better approach to solve various issues.
In addition to this, it’s important to evaluate employee motivation level and issues using one-to-one meeting sessions and address them accordingly. Obviously Managers in their role cannot resolve all kind of problems, but by using their experience managers can help employees guide and if required become a bridge by putting relevant issues to next level for resolution.
4- Be transparent to employees
Effective Managers are transparent to their employees to gain trust. False urgency or deadlines are a huge deterrent to morale and easy way to lose credibility. Sometimes with being transparent with employees; Managers also needs to be flexible..in today’s world, a modern workplace can be mobile and virtual, which gives tremendous opportunities for companies to scale without expanding office locations.
So for an effective managers, first it’s important to find out what factors motivates each employee or team member, then apply above generic suggestions to keep them motivated in order to product quality results.
Thanks for reading,
Nabeel Shahid
SABIT SOLUTIONS