A highly motivated company is productive, less distracted, and more innovative.
Motivation isn’t just about high salaries anymore. With competition in all industries at a high point, big and small businesses alike are implementing new ways to keep employees motivated and highly engaged.
Here are some tips on how to keep a company motivated.
Address Motivation Killers
Research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that employee programs that inspire happiness can incentivize motivation, but only to a certain point. Employees that are happy in their job can still be complacent and unmotivated. Identifying exactly what hampers or dampens employees’ motivation can help boost company morale. Blindly introducing methods can be counterproductive and might do your employees more harm than good.
Typical motivation killers include abrasive personalities, poor communication standards, lack of professional development, and inefficient management styles. A Vistaprint survey revealed that high level stress from work, issues with salary, and a lack of work-life balance are the leading factors that kill motivation in the U.S.
Collaboration is Key
A study from Stanford University found that those who worked in collaboration with others were 64% more likely to stick at their task than those who worked alone. Teamwork helps tap into collaborative talent and the various strengths employees possess, thus helping to build a workplace that has opportunities for growth and development. This is why Maryville University call collaboration the key to success no matter the size of the business. Employees are more likely to continue working for a business much longer if they have strong ties with the people they work with. Even with the rise in mobile workers we are seeing today, collaboration can be supported by different technologies that enable teamwork tracking.
Provide Professional Development Opportunities
Establishing clear opportunities for career development and professional advancement can boost morale more than monetary incentives. Air Malta’s CIO Alan Talbot shared with Zdnet that their company managed to attract employees from different industries – even high paying ones like IT – by reshaping career paths in their organization. Providing a career rather than a job, he says, got them loyal and inspired workers that kept pushing their company forward.
Fair warning: ineffective hierarchical models of organization can also de-motivate employees. A flexible and team centric model of organization is much more enabling, according to a Global Human Capital study by Bersin et al.
Gamify Your Workplace
Monotonous routines can easily bore your employees and can impact their drive. Gamification involves creating systems with built-in incentives and elements that make repetitive tasks more engaging. This can also provide a better vantage point so that employees see the bigger picture.
Gamifying the workplace with badges, rewards, and reporting can easily increase an employee’s driving force for innovation. MyObjectives is not only a full-capacity performance tracker but can also be used to increase user participation through visual rewards like instant scoring, badges, and charts. This software encourages collaboration, displays professional development opportunities, and enhances engagement, which the modern workforce needs to stay motivated.
Article by Caroline Spencer
for MyObjectives.com