National Employee Motivation Day – 23 Simple Ways to Motivate your Team

Do you know how to keep your employees motivated?

It’s time to put down the carrot and stick — being a good manager doesn’t need to be complicated.
Lead your team by example and learn how to cultivate a positive work environment. When people experience meaning in their jobs and are motivated by more than just the salary, everyone feels the benefit.
Here are 23 simple ways to motivate your team:

1. Individual recognition goes a long way. Receiving attention from management congratulating an achievement or success — whatever the size — has a powerful effect. Catch people when they are doing something right, pick up the phone or drop into their office — the personal touch counts.
2. Celebrating success as a company. Have you just secured a new client, or renewed a contract? Have you just received great feedback on your service? Let everyone know and recognise the contribution everyone has made. People will feel connected to the bigger picture and feel that their work matters.
3. Employee of the year / quarter is another great way to highlight success. Encourage individuals to recognise their colleagues by making it a voted award — and then encourage the employee of the year to share their experiences. What have they learned and what did they do that made a difference to their colleagues or clients?
4. Introduce kudos awards for people going over and above their daily job roles and encourage a ‘can-do’ attitude amongst workers.
5. Work smarter not harder. Provide employees with tools and skills development to help them do their jobs better. Let them know you’re prepared to invest into them — and it needn’t be expensive. Ask them what would make the biggest difference to improving the quality and efficiency of their work. And then listen.
6. Ensure you have a range of training options available to keen staff members or for those who need additional support. Don’t let your staff become stagnant or bored — keep striving to get the best from them.
7. Offer your employees clear career progression. Give them something to work towards and show them how valued they are in the company’s future.
8. Consider mentorship schemes with managers across the organisation to help other employees get to where they want to go in the business and achieve their own career goals.
9. Create a clean working environment. According The London Office Workers’ Survey, 86% rated this as very important to them. Workers also feel more productive in a clean environment — 90% of survey respondents agreed.
10. Listen to your staff. Find out what makes them tick, listen to their suggestions and let them know they have a voice — which is valued.
11. Celebrate personal milestones including birthdays, engagements and work anniversaries. Show your staff you care.
12. Set a good example and be a leader that your team wants to follow. A high energy team is the result of a positive and motivated leader.
13. Katie Ashwood, Sales Manager at Swift Office Cleaning Services Ltd, finds using visuals to display targets a good source of motivation. Each member of their team has an expectation of what they need to achieve and a clear goal; “seeing the figures makes the team drive together to not only meet but to beat the sales targets, we really feed off of each other’s energy to get there”.
14. Cultivate a positive work environment that has honest conversations and learns and adapts when mistakes are made. Motivating your staff is also about what you don’t do — blaming and unhelpful gossip creates a toxic workplace.
15. Have fun! The Swift team find that enjoying themselves in the office doesn’t equate to slacking – it has quite the opposite effect. “If ‘laughter is the best medicine’ then in the workplace it’s certainly an effective remedy to sluggish moods, we’re far more productive when we’ve got a smile on our faces”, comments Katie Ashwood.
16. Encourage team commitment with events or competitions. You want your staff to be able to work together to achieve results as well as drive their own personal development.
17. Generating a community spirit amongst your team helps to keep morale high. People feel better supported and healthier when part of a community of people they respect.
18. Encourage your employee’s to have lives out of the office including hobbies and spending quality time with family and friends. “Presenteeism” where your employees consistently stay too late in the office is not productive or healthy for the individual or the business.
19. Do you know if your workers like the physical space in which they sit for 40 hours a week? It’s a good question to ask. The majority of respondents to The London Office Workers’ Survey had issues with the office décor, cleanliness, space, light, environment and facilities with 87% of people wanting to change something related to these areas. Storage space and natural light were cited as the most important. It would be a massive failure on the company’s part to lose valued team members because of the physical environment.
20. Give people a reason to get up and come to work by giving their job and the organisation purpose. Creating a job which has meaning and in which they have a feeling of self-worth will help improve loyalty and engagement plus reduce absenteeism. An employee who enjoys coming to work is a worthy investment.
21. Remember remuneration. Regular pay reviews for staff is a fair way to ensure each member of the team is being paid for the work they’re doing; it helps them to feel valued and appreciated. Financial reward goes a long way to maintaining motivated staff, especially when a commission structure is in place.
22. Empower team members by giving them responsibility. Treat staff like lemmings and they’ll behave like one. By giving individuals tasks that they are equipped to do and have autonomy over helps to give people extra purpose in their jobs.
23. Privacy. In large open plan offices sometimes the need for privacy gets overlooked. Make it possible for staff to work in smaller meeting rooms if needed or at least encourage them to take 5 minutes away from their desk or place of work to collect their thoughts — and see them return to their work with more energy and motivation than before!

A manager’s job is far more than just communicating an organisation’s goals to the teams and ensuring that crude targets are being hit, it’s about nurturing the talent, progressing people, cultivating an environment where people want to come to work and give their best. It’s not an easy task but hopefully these tips will help you and your team this National Employee Motivation Day.
Want to speak to a happy team about your contract cleaning services? Creating a clean working environment is something you can tick off your list today. Call us on 0203 405 8442.