6 Proven Approaches to Motivate Employees

You believe in your company profoundly. There is always a passion burning head strong inside you which motivates you to work harder each day. But can the same be said for your employees each day?

In a SHRM Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement survey, only 69 percent of employees felt they were consistently putting all their effort into their work.

Today’s workforce consists of 5 generations which makes it a challenging task to understand all the needs. You need to maximize revenue and increase productivity, which means you need your staff to work as efficiently as possible. Now this can be possible when on organization clearly recognizes the need and ways to motivate their employees.

Peoplecart have jotted down the top 6 recognition that should work well with diverse workforce.

1. Opportunities for Growth:

Workplace Insights Survey found that around 26% of people leave their job because of lack of career development opportunities.

Opportunity for growth is on #1 position on this list. This is the key to long lasting and satisfying jobs. Your employees are more motivated when they know they’re learning something new and valuable.

Career development is considered to be the most rewarding amongst employees. Motivate your employees by offering relevant training, workshops that keeps them updated with the latest technology and industry trends. Groom your employees well. It also enables you to build a good reputation for your company.

2. Fun Work Environment: 

Most of the Fortune 500 companies’ employees mentioned that fun work environment was their reason to stay longer in the company.

Create an engaged workforce by adding a fun culture. Leverage and design activities in a way that the organizational values become deep rooted in your employees. Play with your company values by adding gamification elements. This will suffice two aspects. Employees would be aligned to the organizational priorities and at the same time they will enjoy their work.

3. Incentive program:

A study by the Bersin group states that companies that offer incentive programs have experienced 14% higher employee productivity than those that do not offer such programs.

Incentive Programs drives the performance of employees. You can target their KPI’s and build a story around it proliferating them to achieve their targets. Most companies would introduce a reward program and incentivize the workforce for achieving the results. The change which can deliver better results is the introduction of gamification in the same program. This would definitely increase participation and lead to a healthier competition. It in turn would drive the workforce to aim higher to achieve their targets. 

Organizations that have incentive programs experience a 31% decrease in employee turnover.

4. Immediate Recognition by Manager 

A study by Interact with 1000 workers in the United States demonstrated that 63% complained about the lack of appreciation by their managers.

This is the highest percentage of all complaints during the study. It was further observed that when managers recognize employees’contribution, employee engagement increases by 60%                                 

It is amazing how a simple “please” and “thank you” fares with employees. Recognition plays a very important role in motivating an employee to go beyond his call of duty. Immediate and real time recognition is even more important. The essence of it fades if an employee is not appreciated on the spot. You should make sure that the recognition culture starts from the top management level and cascades further down the hierarchy. Pen down your goals and objectives as to where do you want to see your employees in the near future. Accordingly design a dynamic Reward and Recognition framework . 

5. Supportive Colleagues: 

Companies that encourage their employees to support one another have experienced 41% of increase in customer satisfaction.

Peer to Peer appreciation provides the base for the support system to develop. It is important that employees appreciate their colleague’s effort and let them know that they value their help. This would encourage them to be supportive towards each other and lead to greater employee satisfaction. The fact that employees develop a habit of appreciation helps them to serve their ultimate customers better.

According to SHRM Survey 41% of companies that use peer-to-peer recognition have seen marked positive increases in customer satisfaction.

6. Encourage ideation and support innovation 

Establish a conducive environment that can enable employees to think beyond  their day to day jobs and unleash their imagination, and creativity. Encourage contributions from employees, make them feel that their ideas are valued and recognize them for their effort and suggestions. Allow them to share their ideas and have the open door policy in your organization.

Engaged employee can directly impact the revenue of the company. In research prepared for the UK government (Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement), David MacLeod and Nita Clarke found the following correlations to employee engagement:

Companies with low engagement scores earn an operating income 32.7 percent lower than companies with more engaged employees.

Similarly, companies with a highly engaged workforce experience a 19.2 percent growth in operating income over a 12-month period

Let us know if these suggestions helped you. Peoplecart has been helping organizations align their workforce to organizational priorities through its Engagement and Recognition Platform.