Having a motivated workforce is key to your business’s success. If each member of your team is driven to achieve, they will each do their bit to move your business forward, helping it to hit and even exceed its goals. Here we highlight the nine most effective employee motivation strategies.
Jump to:
Encourage career development within your company
If employees join your company knowing that they have room to grow and progress up the career ladder, they are more likely to work hard, strive for promotion and stay for the long term. To drive employee morale and motivation, show your employees that they are not just starting a job with you, they are continuing their career journey with you.
Encourage existing staff to apply for more senior roles as they become available. The current CEO of BP, Bernard Looney, joined the oil and gas company in 1991 as a drilling engineer. When new staff members see evidence of other members of staff progressing up a company’s hierarchy, this helps them to believe that they can also win internal promotion.
Invest in your employees’ careers too. Run regular accredited training and development programmes and push team members to take certified external courses by contributing to their costs.
You can also boost employee motivation by spending time with each of your employees and asking them how they want their careers to progress. You can then try to design a programme that helps them work towards achieving their career goals.
Create an enjoyable working environment
While some positions feature more mundane repetitive tasks than others, there are tedious aspects to every job. If you create an enjoyable working environment, employee morale and motivation will naturally be boosted. If your employees enjoy being at work, they will be better motivated to do their work. Regular staff catchups, monthly social get togethers, team lunches and away-days, all give employees a chance to develop friendships, to discuss their challenges at work and to also support and motivate each other.
Remote working makes it more difficult to create an engaging, fun working environment for your whole team, but it’s not impossible. Using video conference calling, online quizzes and remote working apps, such as Slack, you can quickly get remote workers to feel part of your company.
Discover more on remote working in our 7 Tips for Building a Remote Start-Up Team feature.
Be flexible
Employees appreciate the chance to work flexibly when necessary now more than ever. If they would rather arrive at 10am to avoid rush hour and work through until 6.30pm and this doesn’t interfere with their job, let them. If they want to work a compressed week, which could mean, say, working longer hours four days a week so that they can have Friday afternoons off, and, again, this doesn’t interfere with their job, let them.
By encouraging flexibility, you demonstrate that you trust your employees to do their work brilliantly in a way that suits them. This should, in turn, motivate them to want to prove you right. Plus, it works both ways; when you’re up against a deadline and you need your staff to work late one night, they are more likely to do so happily, because they appreciate the times when you have been reasonable with their demands.
Provide desirable perks
Perks are those additional benefits that come with the job. You could pay for or contribute to your employees’ health insurance or gym membership. You could provide a free breakfast or lunch once a week or arrange for a masseuse to come in monthly.
Online employment network LinkedIn is known for its particularly generous company perks, these include paying for educational courses, subsidising pet day care and even contributing towards personal trainer costs and house cleaning. Check out all the LinkedIn benefits for inspiration. Once you enjoy a benefit it’s hard to give it up and used in combination with some of the other points in this guide, perks can be great for employee motivation.
Set targets
Sales staff expect to be set targets; they know that they have to bill say, £20,000 a month. While they might not be given financial targets, non-sales staff can equally be given key performance indicators (KPIs) to strive for. A marketing manager, for example, could be asked to double your number of Twitter followers over a three-month period; a business developer could be asked to break into a new market and a customer-service provider could be required to increase your company’s customer satisfaction rating from three out of five to four or above out of five.
You can also set team targets; each of the individuals in that team will then spur each other on to meet their individual targets, because it will help them to all meet their group’s targets. Most people enjoy a challenge and having targets and KPIs to meet are great employee motivation drivers.
Be appreciative
When someone achieves something that benefits your business, however big or small it might be, take time to find out about it, congratulate them and consider rewarding them. Maybe the office manager has found a cheaper stationery supplier that will save you hundreds of pounds a year, or perhaps the new graduate intern has managed to crack the Asian market for the first time.
Notify your line managers that you want to know about these achievements or schedule a slot to hear about them in company meetings. And, when you do get to know about them, give the person responsible a call, pop over to their desk to shake their hand, or take the team responsible out for lunch. Make your employees feel special and valued members of the company and they will increasingly feel part of the company and motivated to do even better for it.
The following three points are different ways you can show just how much you appreciate your employee’s efforts.
Reward staff
Reward both individual staff and teams when they meet their targets. These rewards could come in the form of financial bonuses or other attractive incentives, such as extra paid leave, vouchers for the theatre, lunch out at a top restaurant, a team-building evening at an escape room, or even something as extravagant as a weekend away.
Everyone values being appreciated and while a personal thank you is lovely; a special treat will always be welcomed and will instantly boost employee morale and motivation.
Give employees a share of the profits
A profit-sharing scheme is where a percentage of your profits are distributed to your employees. This can be a very successful form of employee motivation, if your business is highly profitable and employees can see those profits rising.
It won’t work for every business though. Profit-sharing schemes can serve to demotivate employees if, despite all their individual efforts, profits are low or down on the previous year – this could be because of general market conditions or it could be because you have made a major infrastructure investment in the business hitting your profit margins, in which case you risk fuelling employee resentment.
Give employees a share in your business
When you reward employees by giving them shares in your business, it incentivises them to want the business to succeed and hopefully pushes them to work that bit harder in their jobs. When employees have a stake in your business and they can see it growing, they may also be more inclined to stay with you long term.
There are a number of different ways that you can allocate shares to your employees. Share Incentive Plans (SIPs), for example, allow you to reward your employees with shares each year, so that they gradually build up a bigger stake in your company. While Company Share Option Plans (CSOPs) gives employees the option to buy shares in your company for a fixed price.
Harper James Solicitors’ employment solicitors can advise you on the best employee incentive arrangements for your situation and can draw up the necessary contracts to make these legally binding.
