Effective Ways to Motivate Your Team
Teamwork takes centre stage at Collabio. We’ve already discussed how to keep team productivity high and now we’d like to talk about the magic of motivation. Motivate your mates to achieve more!
Motivation is reasoned will to do something. It means excitement about work; it is the inner power pushing us towards our goals. Highly motivated people enjoy what they do. They know why they do it and are happy at work. So, let’s find out how to motivate your team!
1. Prioritise Satisfaction and Happiness
A positive environment evokes intrinsic motivation, coming from within. When we are happy with everything around us, we tend to do our best. Oxford scientists found that satisfied employees are 13% more productive.
Try these simple steps to diminish dissatisfaction and build motivation in your colleagues:
- Pay attention to their personalities. Make rewards personal.
- Be friendly and make it fun.
- Conduct polls to pinpoint what is lacking for your team members.
- Celebrate personal and team milestones.
2. Use Both Monetary and Non-Monetary Motivation
Access Perks say that 26% of engaged workers would leave their jobs for a 5% promotion. Randstad’s employer brand research shows that 62% of surveyed employees find salary the most motivating factor. So, offer teammates a schedule of promotions or identify such a need in personal communication.
Other than a fair salary, there are various non-cash methods for engaging people. The same report from Randstad reveals four key motivators at work:
- Work/life balance (58%)
- Job security (56%)
- Pleasant work atmosphere (55%)
- Career progression (49%)
So, incentivise colleagues. Try offering flexible working hours; the ability to choose to work from home or at the office; allow extra days off and find ways to enhance autonomy at work.
3. Appreciate Achievements
Recognise when your teammates are making progress. Share success stories. Let your recognition model appreciation and build a greater sense of support within the team. If hard work is celebrated, people will see the value in their own work and feel motivated for future tasks.
Survey Monkey asked 1500 respondents for their opinions. 63 of them wouldn’t change their jobs as their efforts are recognised at the current workplace.
Recognition is the key to personnel retention. So, we recommend you to:
- Conduct congratulatory announcements.
- Share teammates’ achievements on socials and in the company newsletter.
- Organise surprise parties or “well-done meetings” after important task completion.
- Send them sweets or some merchandise by regular mail.
- Just write a “Thank you for great work” message in chat.
4. Share Constructive Feedback Regularly
Except for positive feedback and appreciation, there are cases when team leaders need to point out mistakes. It is frustrating when someone has done their best and then it hasn’t met the expectations. Mistakes offer golden opportunities for development, yet it’s true that we hesitate when it comes to talking about what went wrong. It can be a hard conversation for team leaders and it isn’t much fun for the workers who made the mistake.
Here are some tips on how to provide people with constructive feedback whilst maintaining optimal motivation:
- Listen to your people before speaking.
- Discuss the action, not the person.
- Don’t express negative emotions, be neutral.
- Be direct — don’t be vague feedback and highlight specific problems.
- Ask questions for self-reflection or give people a hint of how everything can be fixed.
- Share bad feedback in small doses.
All in all, facilitate ways toward ongoing motivation, not depression!
5. Foster Team Collaboration
As Bit.AI says, 33% of employees feel more loyal and motivated thanks to the ability to collaborate. Makes sense; collaboration improves the overall work results. 97% of surveyed specialists believe that a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration for workplace failures.
Collaborative action motivates in these ways:
· Task discussions help to break challenges into simple, achievable parts.
· Communication with the team allows us to look at tasks from different angles.
· The help of team members takes the pressure away from burning deadlines, keeps us from feeling abandoned and supports time management.
GoRemotely, 70% of employees state that digital tools improved their collaboration with the team. Great news for us!
So, if you want to work feeling motivated and engaged in common activities, try using Collabio Spaces. If you’d like to learn how to co-author your documents privately with both remote and nearby teammates, check out this piece!
6. Manage, Don’t Micromanage
No one feels comfortable when their boss or team leader looks over their shoulder to check if everything is okay. Commonly, we understand micromanagement as forcing someone to cope with tasks in their own way, but often without sufficient context, support and help.
To manage people the right way, focus on motivation:
- Ask them questions and discuss the process of the tasks. Avoid focusing on final results alone.
- Focus on “why”, not just “how”.
- Provide people with timely feedback.
- Promote autonomy for your teammates to deal with tasks creatively.
- Encourage non-standard ways of solving common issues.
This will bolster team motivation and eagerness to work. If you won’t give them this freedom, they will feel like birds in a cage. Sure, there are rules everyone must follow (especially when it comes to planning and meeting deadlines), but entrust people to do the in-between work, as they see fit.
We hope that these tips will move your team’s motivation to the next level! By the way, if you work exclusively remotely, pay attention to these recommendations. Supporting remote collaboration is hard, but critical.
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