5 Easy Ways to Create and Sustain Stellar Employee Motivation
Whether you’re in the transportation industry, food service, hotels, or something else, motivating your workforce to serve your customers to the best of their ability is the gold standard of excellence. And it’s something top companies are always striving to do smarter. We’ve discovered there are a few simple ways to motivate your employees so that they listen better and give back to your customers with their whole heart and well-minded intentions which delivers excellent results year after year. Here are some of our favorites. Share yours with us on Twitter @smartcars1 using the hashtag #motivateme.
Some employees, the great ones, will come in and have boundless ideas for your business already in mind. So don’t squash their enthusiasm by installing your predetermined agenda. Let them take 5-10% percent of their time and work on it. Encourage them to build an internal team to help them. This gives people in the company the ability to work on something they might normally not and it gives them true ownership in the outcome and success of their initiatives. And that’s a powerful thing.
- Encourage employees to give back.
Offer every person the opportunity to volunteer a portion of their work time to helping the community. Not only will you build good will and a sense of purpose in your employees but you’ll show your community that you’re there to participate in activities that benefit the community not just profit from them. It’s a win-win. Or let your employees pick the charity they want to sponsor for your annual giving contribution. It makes a great PR headline and gives the employees something more than just work to be a part of. You can do this by sharing your annual charity budget and letting the employees vote on how to distribute the funds or by offering to match each employee’s personal contribution up to a certain dollar amount.
- Try to simplify daily operations – take out the guesswork.
No job is completely simple and straight forward. There are ‘exceptions’ to every rule. By simplifying and streamlining your employee’s processes and setting standards, you take a lot of the guesswork out of the repetitive daily activities and set them up for success. And every good employee that wants to do well appreciates this. Would your customer service team be better served if you invested in a SaaS (software as a service) product that would help them do their jobs? If you think so, do it. Would your marketing team have more time in their day with automated tools? If yes, obtain them! Whatever you can do to make their day easier will inevitably make your bottom line stronger.
- Realize that not every employee is the ‘A’ team.
There’s nothing more de-motivating than having to work with someone who doesn’t pull his or her weight and you can find these folks who skimp by with the minimum effort everywhere. So set up all your employees for success by putting everyone on a performance scale and tie it to their salary and a system of ‘warnings’ so you can easily weed out people who just can’t cut the mustard. By setting clear and visible standards you give your best employees’ peace of mind and your worst employees defined and expected goals to strive for. Being fully transparent about your expectations goes a long way.
- Eat and be merry together as a TEAM.
Take a bite out of the work week monotony by taking a group of employees out to lunch once every month. Make it a cross-functional group of people so they get to know one another better. Let them pose the questions to one-another and chime in as a “coach” when needed. Most importantly, communicate these recommendations, ideas and changes on a company-wide correspondence and give credit to all who were involved.
Put these simple management initiatives to work and watch your organizations culture change. You’ll be truly wowed.
“As a brand, you are what you say and do.” –Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg
