Without employees feeling motivated to work correctly you can experience high staff turnover or underperforming teams. This can be due to a lack of mental health support, poor staff wellbeing or not implementing an employee assistance programme. This blog will help you understand how you can have a positive impact on your team’s motivation and productivity?
Communication is Key
Communication is always key across any business, but with the recent pandemic, it has forced more staff to work from home. This will undoubtedly be a new experience for a lot of people and they may feel they are missing the support of their colleagues and managers. Without regular contact, they may also feel as if they have been forgotten about. Don’t feel that sending a daily email to the whole team will cover it. Short 5-minute calls with the team or even regular 1 on 1 catch up calls will make a huge difference to how an employee feels. Make yourself available to your staff, even if it means booking in a meeting. Let them know how to contact you effectively.
Set Realistic Expectations
Not setting KPIs or targets will result in employees feeling aimless, they may be enjoying their work, but they may begin to question why and what they are working towards.
The goals that you set must be realistic and adjusted to suit your business plans but also the skills and competence of the staff. Setting unrealistic targets can cause employees to become stressed and may cause workplace anxiety. This has a major knock-on effect that you may not be prepared to deal with internally. Your employees should be to understand exactly what you expect from them, the best practices to achieve the targets and how they will be judged on it.
Provide Training and Support
This training does not have to just be focused around the best sales method, or how to correctly update the CRM (although essential in some cases). Make it so staff are prepared for any situation they may encounter in or outside of the workplace. This could be through mental health training, fitness, and wellbeing advice or even activities for outside work hours!
Be there to support them through challenging times. Make sure they are equipped with the best possible tools to face their job with. Providing staff with the essentials will allow them to be more productive.
Recognise good performance, provide feedback in private
By acknowledging an employee’s hard work and praising it in line with their KPI’s will reinforce company goals. Make a point of focusing on an area or aspect of work that was carried out. Try to avoid just saying ‘Well done’, an example would be ‘Great work, I really like how you structured this project and prioritized X.’ Proving constructive feedback can be hugely beneficial to both yourself and staff, but there are wrong and right ways to do it. Have a private conversation with them to avoid embarrassment. Outline how it can be improved and provide support if needed. This will allow them to improve and hopefully meet expectations next time.
If you are looking at more ways to improve workplace motivation and provide your staff with the best chances of success, then consider a wellbeing service that can offer specialist support and training. You can find out more about how CiC are the leading providers in employee assistance programmes here.