How to motivate employees – tips that actually work!

I found most resources about employee motivation to be useless. To start off, you get a long list of 10 to 15 tips which you should follow as a leader to motivate your employees. By the time you finish reading item number 9 on the list, you have pretty much forgotten what the first 2 were. On top of that, if you try to implement only one of those tips, such as “Trust Your Employees to Keep Them Motivated” you would quickly discover that there are another 10 tips on building trust in a company. These tips end up piling onto another set of tips and your head gets quickly overloaded with hundreds of items you need to do as a leader to motivate your employees. If you’re trying to build a coherent employee motivation strategy for your company or simply trying to be consistent as a leader in motivating everyone, this approach quickly fails. So, how do you do it? How do you keep everyone engaged and motivated?

Before we jump into the one single thing you need to do to keep employees motivated, let’s quickly define what motivation is. You should firmly understand that motivation is an employee’s own drive to do something. The end result could be anything from achieving a sales quota, winning a competition or completing the project. This inner drive, often called intrinsic motivation, is different for every person and you need to tailor your approach to every employee. For larger companies and divisions, where custom approach to each person is not possible, you simply need to create an environment where this drive can be fulfilled. In this case, your employees will end up motivating themselves because that inner drive will have a space to venture out. Another key point to understand is that this inner drive is different for each person. What motivates you is not the same for every person who reports to you. On paper, this concept is simple and understandable, yet in the real world we often project our own preferences towards work onto people we manage. It’s important to keep these two concepts in mind, in order not to fall into a one-fits-all approach or projecting your own preferences over everyone else’s.

For smaller companies and business units, where you know everyone by name, you can motivate employees by making personal connections. You can also use this method to motivate your direct reportees because it’s easy to maintain a close personal relationship. The best way to know what motivates a person is to have a lot of informal conversations. These can happen at the beginning of your team meetings, 1on1s or around common areas in the office. Once you know someone’s personal aspirations, you can then connect it to the work they’re doing. For example:

1. If someone’s goal is to be a CEO one day, it would make sense to assign projects to this employee which spread across functions. This would allow them to get experience in different departments of the company, all of which count towards experience of being a CEO.

2. If someone is dreaming about buying a new car, you could connect their performance to financial incentives. You could then show how consistently hitting targets would bring them closer to the dream over time.

3. If someone wants to be an industry expert in a particular area, you need to encourage learning on the job and assign challenging tasks to this individual. Let them go as far into nitty gritty details of their responsibilities as possible.

The approach above works great if you can connect with each person individually. What do you do if your division or company is already beyond that point? You rely on software and big data to keep employees motivated. Most leaders would agree that after a company reaches a certain size, communication breaks down and you need to rely on tools to get things done. For example, a lot of companies manage their sales data in Excel tables and Spreadsheets because people on the floor are in close communication and keep things going. As the team grows larger, a Sales CRM where you can log and track customers becomes a necessity. Virtually every process in the company goes through a similar transformation: vacation tracking, accounting, social media management, etc. And yet when it comes to employee motivation, you are expected as a leader to keep a hundred things in mind and act on them: encourage feedback, promote work-life balance, recognize achievements, delegate and the list goes on… No one has the capacity to remember a personal preference of a thousand employees and no one has time to discuss those in a personal setting. That’s where software which identifies and measures intrinsic motivation comes in. It’s the only way to record personal motivation at scale and make meaningful changes to the company based on motivation data.

You can still connect personally with every person who reports to you and ensure that their needs are taken care of. This one action, which you can do every day as leader, will trickle down to the rest of the company down the line. If you’re only starting on your motivation journey, it’s a single best thing you can every day to keep everyone motivated in the long-term. If you need immediate action, following a crisis, a merger or a bad quarter, it’s best to bring science into the equation and use software which measures intrinsic motivation. This will not only help you to motivate your employees, but it will also eliminate any guesswork and ensure that your solutions to motivation are spot on.

Long story short, focus on the individual and all else will follow. Motivated and happy employees will provide great service and deliver high quality work. This, in turn, will make your company healthier and profitable over time.