5 tips to motivate employees
11 June 2014
Read by 2564 persons
Managers and business leaders, one of your biggest challenges this year will be not only to recruit talented employees but also, and above all, to know how to retain them.
How to retain the best members of your team? Contrary to popular belief, salary is far from being the only motivating factor for your employees.
Below are 5 tips that will allow you to motivate your teams, thus significantly increasing their performance and ensuring that your employees will never want to leave you.
1. Communicate
This is the basis of any motivational strategy: the manager must know how to communicate with their employees. Without active communication, it is difficult to maintain the level of involvement of a team.
This communication must take place on three levels: daily (through operational exchanges), medium-term (for example, on the organization and priorities to come of the department) and long-term (on the overall strategy of the company).
This culture of communication must be top-down (hierarchical) but also bottom-up, to allow employees to express themselves.
2. Build trust
No motivation without trust: all specialists in work psychology agree on this observation. For your employees to flourish and cultivate a high degree of motivation, they need to have their own space for action, for which they know they have your trust.
This trust is generally expressed through objective-based management. Your employees must clearly know the missions that are incumbent upon them and the objectives associated with them. Except in the event of a proven problem, the manager will ensure that they only intervene in the missions of their employees during the "control points" predetermined in the planning.
Trust is also gained in the field of human relations: by trusting your team, you have every chance that your team will respect you. A virtuous circle in terms of motivation.
3. Empower
After trust comes empowerment. If objective management allows each employee to better identify their task and role, empowerment management allows you to offer your employees a decision-making capacity in a specific field of action. De facto, this decision-making capacity offers the team additional reasons for satisfaction if the objectives are achieved.
This strategy obviously involves delegation, a way of transmitting one's own motivation in passing.
Beyond involvement, it should be remembered that empowerment acts on several essential factors in a company: the capacity for innovation (by encouraging employees to implement their ideas), the degree of training of the team (by allowing employees to expand their skills) or even the ability to manage delicate situations (by accustoming employees to being autonomous).
4. Orchestrate
The motivation of your employees also rests on "intellectual excitement". Nothing better than routine work to undermine, week after week, the motivation level of a team.
Like an orchestra conductor, the manager must know how to transmit impulses to his employees, by occasionally launching innovative projects or "challenge projects". These impulses help to galvanize the troops, provided that the success of the projects is clearly associated with a reward (bonus, day off, evening, meal...).
5. Foster a positive atmosphere
It goes without saying that motivation is closely linked to the environment in which your employees evolve. The manager must therefore be attentive to the atmosphere of his team or department, by getting to know each employee and acting on the problems capable of disrupting their motivation level.
This logic obviously implies regularly organizing federating activities (meetings, seminars, training...). The atmosphere also rests on the image that employees have of their manager. As such, loyalty is one of the most determining qualities.
Philippe Montant
CEO of ReKrute
How to retain the best members of your team? Contrary to popular belief, salary is far from being the only motivating factor for your employees.
Below are 5 tips that will allow you to motivate your teams, thus significantly increasing their performance and ensuring that your employees will never want to leave you.
1. Communicate
This is the basis of any motivational strategy: the manager must know how to communicate with their employees. Without active communication, it is difficult to maintain the level of involvement of a team.
This communication must take place on three levels: daily (through operational exchanges), medium-term (for example, on the organization and priorities to come of the department) and long-term (on the overall strategy of the company).
This culture of communication must be top-down (hierarchical) but also bottom-up, to allow employees to express themselves.
2. Build trust
No motivation without trust: all specialists in work psychology agree on this observation. For your employees to flourish and cultivate a high degree of motivation, they need to have their own space for action, for which they know they have your trust.
This trust is generally expressed through objective-based management. Your employees must clearly know the missions that are incumbent upon them and the objectives associated with them. Except in the event of a proven problem, the manager will ensure that they only intervene in the missions of their employees during the "control points" predetermined in the planning.
Trust is also gained in the field of human relations: by trusting your team, you have every chance that your team will respect you. A virtuous circle in terms of motivation.
3. Empower
After trust comes empowerment. If objective management allows each employee to better identify their task and role, empowerment management allows you to offer your employees a decision-making capacity in a specific field of action. De facto, this decision-making capacity offers the team additional reasons for satisfaction if the objectives are achieved.
This strategy obviously involves delegation, a way of transmitting one's own motivation in passing.
Beyond involvement, it should be remembered that empowerment acts on several essential factors in a company: the capacity for innovation (by encouraging employees to implement their ideas), the degree of training of the team (by allowing employees to expand their skills) or even the ability to manage delicate situations (by accustoming employees to being autonomous).
4. Orchestrate
The motivation of your employees also rests on "intellectual excitement". Nothing better than routine work to undermine, week after week, the motivation level of a team.
Like an orchestra conductor, the manager must know how to transmit impulses to his employees, by occasionally launching innovative projects or "challenge projects". These impulses help to galvanize the troops, provided that the success of the projects is clearly associated with a reward (bonus, day off, evening, meal...).
5. Foster a positive atmosphere
It goes without saying that motivation is closely linked to the environment in which your employees evolve. The manager must therefore be attentive to the atmosphere of his team or department, by getting to know each employee and acting on the problems capable of disrupting their motivation level.
This logic obviously implies regularly organizing federating activities (meetings, seminars, training...). The atmosphere also rests on the image that employees have of their manager. As such, loyalty is one of the most determining qualities.
Philippe Montant
CEO of ReKrute
