Motivation may come naturally to some people, but staying motivated is a constant effort for others. Luckily, the right tools can make it possible to perfect your skills and maintain productivity.
Employees are particularly prone to procrastination at some point or another. Forming daily motivational habits at work is important to keep yourself driven to succeed. However, many employees fall short of a supportive management system. In this case, managers and leaders are responsible for motivating employees with special perks and positive interactions.
If you’re a manager looking to maintain employee satisfaction, read this article to learn how you can motivate staff and increase team productivity through the power of reading.
Key points:
You can inspire your team and create a thriving work environment as a manager. Treating your employees respectfully, giving clear expectations, and fostering positive relationships can cultivate growth and progress.
Taking time to understand what your employees need from you is essential to making sure they feel motivated in the workplace. Some ways to motivate employees include giving them more flexibility with a work-life balance, prioritizing their mental and physical needs, offering development opportunities, and taking the appropriate steps toward a better performance review process.
Motivating employees with perks like learning opportunities and flexible scheduling will maintain their interest in company goals and boost their performance level. Headway is a fantastic option for workplaces wanting to improve employee morale and allow employees to work on their personal development as a team.
Top three inspiring books on leadership and motivation
Books can offer managers the opportunity to spruce up their one-on-one and teamwork skills and become better leaders in the workplace. As such, book summaries are a great way to improve your leadership qualities and increase employee engagement and team motivation.
Headway is an app that offers you access to thousands of non-fiction book summaries. Download Headway on Google Play or the Apple Store to hear more from inspirational leaders and intellectuals.
To give you some insight, here are three leading books on the Headway app designed to provide expert insight and advice.
1. Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t by Simon Sinek
Leaders Eat Last discusses leaders’ biological impact on society and how hormones influence people’s actions. In this light, Simon Sinek offers a deeper perspective into the mind of a leader who cultivates a “Circle of Safety” to manage a workplace effectively. As great leadership begins with establishing respectful and loyal relationships with followers, Sinek stresses the importance of practicing autonomy and empathy under leadership rule.
2. Dare to Lead: Daring Greatly and Rising Strong at Work by Brene Brown
This book shows readers a daring insight into what it means to lead bravely in a high-performing professional environment. Dare to Lead teaches four skills to develop a powerful leadership mindset by guiding individuals to learn to rise and overcome vulnerability. All in all, Brene Brown demonstrates what leaders need to be successful and inspires the belief that courage and bravery are learned qualities.
3. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
Drive is a profound book that breaks down everything involving motivation through a psychological lens. Starting with abolishing the carrot and stick approach, Daniel H. Pink shares a fascinating viewpoint on the history and theory of motivation. Throughout the book, readers can gain insight into what motivated early humans and how this intrinsic behavior continues to impact people in the 21st-century economy.
10 best strategies to motivate employees
A successful company begins with how its employees are treated. Here are ten great ways to keep employees motivated and improve your team’s overall sense of purpose and performance.
1. Offer motivational perks
When looking for a job, potential employees will often choose the one that will offer them the most benefits. As such, it is important to boost your company’s offerings with special perks available to team members only. This can be anything from an optimal health insurance plan to remote work to a multi-user subscription service with benefits designed to keep them motivated on the job long-term.
As a manager, you might consider offering your team a premium group subscription to a book summary app that helps them cater to their personal and professional needs. In this regard, the Headway app can offer your employees unlimited access to over 1500 audio summaries of bestsellers in self-help and career and professional development. Motivate your team by providing an unlimited supply of educational and self-development content on the Headway App.
2. Encourage respectful relationships
Healthy working relationships begin with a positive management system. Similar to how children look to adults when they aren’t sure how to react, employees may often look to their superiors for guidance and advice. Therefore, your responsibility as a manager is to lead by example by maintaining healthy professional relationships.
When managing a team, setting clear goals, rules, and expectations is important, for example, telling them gossip or bad language will not be allowed. You must also lead by example and treat everyone with respect and kindness. When your team feels respected, they can also feel motivated to perform their job duties efficiently and effectively.
3. Give your employees more flexibility
Nowadays, it is becoming more common for companies to switch from physical offices to hybrid workplaces. Some companies are even ridding themselves of traditional office buildings and transitioning to remote work headquarters. As it becomes easier to offer your employees more flexibility, it may prove beneficial to offer them the option to work from home with daily or weekly check-ins.
Many businesses report an increase in their employees’ performance levels when they can work remotely. This is because some people find themselves more productive when in the comfort of their own homes and don’t have to face a dreaded commute. It may also give people more time to be with their families and perform other tasks throughout the day, which helps to reduce overwhelm, avoid burnout, and boost mental health.
4. Shower them with praise
Managers don’t always have to be the traditional stern and demeaning figure often depicted in movies. Being the exact opposite can have significant benefits on company culture and employee retention rates. Praise and positive feedback, even constructive feedback, from a superior often go a long way regarding job satisfaction in the corporate world. It gives your employees the confidence they need to continue performing tasks and showing a greater initiative that benefits the company.
You can show your employees that you appreciate their work in simple ways. For instance, appreciation can be shown by complimenting employees’ work habits or offering rewards and incentives for their efforts and good work on a recent project. Creating a positive work environment where everyone is appreciated is key to maintaining your employees’ happiness with the company. Knowing that you enjoy their presence and value their work will motivate your employees to show you their greatest potential.
5. Foster a continuous learning mentality
Even the most successful companies still have things to learn and ways to grow. This mentality of ‘always learning’ continues to help them succeed to new lengths. Let your employees know that the company vision includes a need for consistent improvement by encouraging them to adopt this mentality in their development journey and career paths.
When employees know that their management is serious about maintaining their success, they will be more likely to match the mentality to fit in with their surroundings. In such a case, you can motivate your employees by instilling a desire to continue refining their skills long after they have mastered them.
6. Allow room to grow
As much as you’d like your employees never to make mistakes, you should remember that your employees are only human and that no one is perfect. Putting too much pressure on your team members and punishing them for misunderstandings or basic errors could put unrealistic expectations on them. This can make them feel overwhelmed and even increase the likelihood of leaving the company, affecting the company’s employee retention rates.
Company leaders can increase motivation by allowing employees time to reset after they have experienced a downfall. This will give them time to accept their mistake and make subsequent goals to prevent them from making the same error again. As such, your employees may be more likely to prioritize self-development if they feel safe to make mistakes.
7. Prioritize their needs
What’s the number one way of showing your employees you care about them? By taking care of their basic needs, AKA employee recognition. Besides that, people tend to focus better when they have full stomachs. Ensuring your employees are not skipping meals due to work will gain you their trust and admiration as a manager and raise the overall employee morale. Consider offering your employees complimentary food.
You can start small by offering free snacks and hot drinks, and then maybe take it up a notch with a free weekly lunch or takeaway coupons if they have to work late. Remember to check for any specific dietary restrictions. With perks like this, they will be more likely to go the extra mile to fulfill their responsibilities.
8. Recognize their achievements
Managers can form a habit of picking on their employees’ weaknesses and shortcomings. Although this may be necessary at times, doing it too often can negatively affect your employee’s self-esteem or perception of their job. It’s important to show your employees that you recognize both their small and big achievements within their workflow. Most people can agree that encouragement and positive feedback feels much more motivational than criticism.
Simply letting your employees know you notice their growth and determination will motivate them to continue learning and performing tasks correctly. For example, if an employee is struggling to learn a new task, aim to congratulate them on their small victories rather than focusing on their negative qualities.
9. Have regular open discussions
Healthy, open communication is beneficial in personal relationships and can be a positive tool in professional development and the workplace. Fostering an open-minded work environment can help employees feel safe to discuss any concerns or issues. This can allow your company to grow into a place that puts all its employees into consideration. In turn, you will better understand what your employees want from you as a manager and strive to fulfill those obligations.
Consider hosting a weekly or monthly team-building meeting to discuss any ideas, opinions, or issues within the workplace. This can be the designated time when anyone can bring up any reasonable request or offer employee feedback without feeling that they will be judged or shut down. Giving your employees a chance to feel heard and like their voice matters can help them feel motivated to continue showcasing their highest abilities.
10. Take steps to improve the performance review process
All well-managed companies should have regular performance reviews as part of their performance management agenda. Traditional performance reviews are often thought of as meetings to focus on areas they need to improve. Still, they can also be part of your motivation strategy. Rather than making your employees feel like they are being interrogated, consider sprucing up your performance review process with one that considers their positive attributes.
With the right tools, the performance review can positively motivate your employees to improve their abilities. For instance, if your employee has been struggling to meet deadlines, this can be the starting point of a discussion that leads to how you can better meet their needs as a manager. By identifying their weaknesses as opportunities for growth and future success, your employee will likely feel supported and motivated in their problem-solving and self-development goals.
Motivate your team with a Headway subscription
Leadership is about making decisions that benefit the whole company. This includes finding ways to motivate team members to feel inspired to perform at their best. Fortunately, Headway is a fantastic resource for companies looking to improve their work culture through access to career and skill-building audiobook summaries.
Headway allows companies to purchase a multi-user subscription that their entire team can access. With this app, you can track your team’s progress, collect achievements, and improve employee relationships all in one place.
Your team will be able to listen to Headway’s collection of audiobook summaries at home, at work, or on the go to improve their productivity and self-development.
Download the Headway app for unlimited access to a library of over 1500+ audiobook summaries.
FAQs
How do I motivate employees as a manager?
Knowing how to motivate employees as a manager isn’t easy. After all, you’re managing a large team of people with a broad range of personality types, skill sets, and personal needs. Some of the best ways to motivate employees include recognizing their achievements and milestones, helping with goal-setting, and giving them room to make mistakes.
What motivates people at work?
What motivational factors work for one employee may not work the same for another. So when it comes to staff motivation, it’s worth implementing multiple strategies to ensure everyone’s needs are accounted for. Generally, employees are mostly motivated by praise, ambition, and a need to learn and improve. These motivations can be led on by strategies like offering perks like subscriptions and recognizing achievements when they are due.
How to build a team-oriented environment?
It takes time to build a strong team environment, but the hard work starts with management and how the team interacts. A good manager will encourage intrinsic motivation and healthy co-worker relationships by modeling the behaviors you wish to see from them. Prioritize the well-being and needs of your employees. Team-oriented environments are built through various techniques, such as regular open discussions and team lunches.
