5 Steps to Help Keep Employees Motivated

It can be easy to underestimate the importance of keeping employees motivated in the workplace. Motivated employees are ones who are engaged and boost the productivity of their team and company as a whole. Knowing how to keep employees motivated can be a challenge because each team has its own dynamics.

Failure to keep your team motivated can have an overall negative impact on your company. This can lead to lost revenue, disgruntled customers, and employees who aren’t engaged with the company. Usually, poor leadership, lack of challenging work, and conflict in the workplace can all affect employee motivation.

Before we look at the 6 steps to help keep employees motivated, let’s briefly look at some benefits of a driven workforce.

Why Keep Employees Motivated

What are the benefits of keeping your staff and team members highly motivated?

If you liken your company to a motor vehicle then motivated staff are the fuel that drives the vehicle forward. A lack of motivation from employees will be like trying to drive with the brakes on. You put in a lot of effort and resources but don’t get anywhere fast.

Motivated employees are generally committed to their work, satisfied and positive with their tasks, and work efficiently.

Therefore, engaged and motivated employees are extremely important to the performance the company they work for.

5 Steps to Motivate Your Team

Let’s look in more detail at some ways you can boost the morale of your workforce and get your team motivated.

Communication

Communication is important to boost morale and prevent employees from becoming disengaged. Communicating effectively with each team member helps to find out about their ideas, concerns, or attitude. It will also help employees feel as though you are not just their boss but part of the team.

One way to use communication to motivate your team is to take some time to speak with them regularly in an informal setting.

Create challenging tasks

If can be very difficult for employees to stay focused and motivated if work becomes repetitive and a chore. Of course, some types of work involve doing tasks that may seem tedious. However, you need to make sure that employees can develop new skills by assigning them challenging tasks. This can help to break up the monotony of having to care for repetitive tasks.

Make employees feel appreciated

One of the best ways to easily motive your team is to recognise good work and show appreciation for your employees’ commitments. Everyone needs to feel appreciated and saying how great a job someone did can be as valuable as a gift. Appreciation will build loyalty among employees and encourage them to work hard.

Support initiative

As a team leader who wants to motivate the rest of the team members, it’s essential to give a certain amount of freedom when carrying out tasks. Let team member use their initiative and empower them to make some decisions. If you have communicated the goals of the job clearly and concisely, then a dedicated team will work hard towards achieving those goals.

It is also important to stay engaged with your team and offer any support along the way.

Create a positive working environment

You should remember that during the week, your employees are probably spending more of their waking time in the office than at home. So, you can motive their desire to work hard by creating a positive workplace environment.

The workplace should have areas for work, rest, and also some fun. Sometimes increasing the number of plants in the office, having fun pictures in communal areas, or improving the lighting are small tweaks to create a positive working environment. In fact, studies have shown that better lighting in the office increases alertness and productivity.

You could also conduct an employee survey to get their input on any changes they would like to see.