How to Motivate Employees: 9 Ways to Improve Your Business
Published: | Last Updated:
A study by UKG found that 60% of employees worldwide say their job is the biggest contributing factor to their mental health. Another study found that half of the workforce feels somewhat valued, and 1 in 10 workers don’t feel valued at all.
When employees feel undervalued and like work is dragging down their mental health, they are more likely to leave their job.
That’s where employee motivation comes in. With proper incentives, benefits, recognition, and pay, employees will be more motivated to provide top-notch work.
In this article, we’ll talk about why employee motivation is so important and how you can improve it.
Why is Employee Motivation Important?
Employee motivation helps create a productive, innovative, and fun working environment. Without motivation, employees won’t have a good reason to produce quality work or find a new job. Motivated employees are more likely to continue at their workplace and contribute positively.
Employees are your most important asset. Taking steps to ensure they’re motivated and happy with their work will improve their lives inside and outside of the workplace.
How to Improve Employee Morale and Motivation
Keeping employees motivated will improve the overall success and growth of your business. Motivating employees isn’t something you can do every once in a while. It’s something that needs to be baked into how your business operates.
These are just some of the ways you can improve your employee’s morale and motivation.
1. Public and Private Recognition
This might surprise you—people like to hear they’re doing a good job. When someone goes above and beyond, or even just gets their work done well, let them know you’re happy with the results.
This shouldn’t be formal. Keep it genuine by offering real praise for a job well done. This reminds the worker that they’re doing a good job and that they’re on the right track.
2. Fair Compensation
There’s not much worse than getting paid less for work you could get paid more for. Employees who aren’t getting paid their full due won’t want to stick around.
Fair wages are not central to your location anymore. With remote work becoming the norm, your workers are more likely to look at national averages to find how much their work is worth. Try your hardest to match that.
This might be harder for some companies due to the scale of business. This can be offset with other perks and benefits—but keep in mind, if your employee is making 30k a year and could be making 75k a year, don’t expect them to stick around for a long time.
3. Perks & Benefits
Let's say everyone working the same job was paid the same across the board. What would make your workplace stand out?
Perks and benefits motivate employees because they make your workplace a better place to be a part of. Healthcare benefits are a necessity for most people. If you have good health plans available, you’ll be able to attract and keep top talent.
Perks that motivate employees are:
-
Flexible hours
-
Retirement plans
-
Tuition assistance
-
Gym membership
-
Good amount of paid leave
Available perks will inform potential and current workers what you care about. Including a mission statement about how you support families, but not offering paternity leave, will make workers question your intentions. Create perks that align with the core values of your business.
4. Upward mobility and education
Getting into the office and doing the same thing day in and day out can be monotonous and boring. Offering learning opportunities is a great way to inject new interests into the workplace.
When people learn about their work, it gets them outside of their bubble. They don’t only learn new skills but they gain insight into the present and future state of their career.
As you offer more learning opportunities to your workers, start fostering upward growth in your organization. Offering raises and giving leadership positions often will motivate workers to keep providing top-notch work to your business.
There are countless education options you can find online. Although, they are not made equally. At the REDC we provide businesses and individual students with learning opportunities that match their goals. If you’re a business looking to motivate employees through online learning, get connected and start finding what you need.
Related Articles: Investing in Employee Development
5. Create a Nice Workspace
Working in a dingy, dangerous, or disorganized workplace won’t just decrease productivity, it will discourage your workers. A nice workspace will set up your workers to get their jobs done successfully.
You can do this in several ways:
-
Create a welcoming environment: A nice workspace doesn’t just happen. You’ll have to spend some time, effort, and potentially money to make your working space as inviting as possible.
-
Let people work from home: Instead of working to create a nice working environment, give employees the option to create their workspace however they want it to be.
Your efforts spent making a welcoming working environment or offering money to help people work from home will pay off.
6. Have Fun and Offer Slack-off Time
Dan Ariely, an author known for creating interesting experiments that show the predictably irrational nature of people and economics, found that pizza and praise could be a better motivator than money.
In his study he found that employees who were offered pizza became 6.9% more productive. Those offered a compliment, 6.7%, and those offered a small cash bonus Had a 4.0% increase, but that plummeted into the negatives shortly into the experiment.
Announcing to your staff that they won’t be getting cash bonuses at the end of the year, but they will get pizza every Friday is a sure way to lose talent. However, it’s an interesting look into what motivates people.
Scheduling fun and simple events like a pizza party will help create a greater sense of community and help you keep talent central to your operations. The truth is, everyone needs a break sometimes, and weekends aren’t always enough.
7. Offer Realistic, Performance-Based Incentives
Motivation is something that is constantly being attacked by boredom, stress, and outside influences. As a business leader, you can help keep your workers motivated by offering performance-based incentives, but only if they’re realistic.
Incentives don’t have to be tied directly to productivity, like selling x amount of cars, delivering x amount of packages in x amount of time. They can be review-based. Providing quality work for a client, innovating in a new way, and fostering a healthy work culture are all activities that can be incentivized.
How you structure your incentives is up to you and your business, but they shouldn’t cause additional stress to workers by dangling a carrot just out of reach.
8. Facilitate Better Work-Life Balance
A healthy work-life balance is important to live a healthy life. How does your business plan to help workers have a good balance between work and family?
Paid time off (PTO) is a great motivator for employees. It’s good to know that if a vacation is needed or if sickness hits, they won’t need to worry about losing pay. This frees them of additional stress and helps them enjoy their job more.
Work and life don’t become balanced by offering a bunch of paid time off, although that’s a good start. Customer, client, and employee expectations are also important. If you don’t want your people working on weekends, tell them that and let clients know they can’t contact your team outside of working hours.
9. Create a Friendly Team Culture
Who you work for is just as important as who you work with. Creating a healthy team environment will let employees more easily collaborate and motivate them to work hard.
Workplaces that are plagued with team politics, drama, backstabbing, and overall bad vibes will not foster creativity. A healthy culture won’t just motivate employees, it’s necessary if you want your business to thrive.
Creating an open and friendly environment might be easier said than done. However, if you focus efforts on finding talent that will contribute to positivity you’re in the right direction. That means not only looking for talent, skill, or expertise but looking for emotional intelligence as well.
When considering a new hire, find out what their past bosses have to say about them. Do they have a track record for positivity or are they problem causers?
Related Articles: How To Become a Better Team Player, How To Set Team Goals
Find Resources For Your Business At REDC
The REDC is dedicated to bringing services to businesses throughout Yavapai County. From networking opportunities to education options, we’re here to provide economic and workforce development opportunities.
Connect with us today to begin bringing your business to the next level.