Ten Tips on Improving Employee Motivation (In prospect of company)

Ref: http://www.allbusiness.com/slideshow/top-10-employee-handbook-mistakes-16681018-1.html

1. Build a Foundation

It’s important to build a solid foundation for your employees so they feel invested in the company.

Tell them about the history of the business and your vision for the future. Ask them about their expectations and career goals, as well as how you can help them feel like part of the team. When any new employee starts, make sure they receive a thorough welcome orientation.

2. Create a Positive Environment

Promote an office atmosphere that makes all employees feel worthwhile and important. Don’t play favorites with your staff. Keep office doors open, and let folks know they can always approach you with questions or concerns. After all, a happy office is a productive office.

It’s important to build a solid foundation for your employees so they feel invested in the company.

Tell them about the history of the business and your vision for the future. Ask them about their expectations and career goals, as well as how you can help them feel like part of the team. When any new employee starts, make sure they receive a thorough welcome orientation.

3. Put People on the Right Path

Most employees are looking for advancement opportunities within their own company. Work with each of them to develop a career growth plan that takes into consideration both their current skills and their future goals. If employees become excited about what’s down the road, they will become more engaged in their present work.

4. Educate the Masses

Help employees improve their professional skills by providing on-the-job training or in-house career development. Allow them to attend workshops and seminars related to the industry. Encourage them to attend adult education classes paid for by the company. Employees will feel you are investing in them, and this will translate into improved job performance.

5. Don’t Forget the Fun

Once in a while, you have put work aside and do something nice for the people who work for you.

Treat the office to a pizza lunch or take everyone to the movies. Reward employees with an unexpected day off or by closing the office early on a random Friday afternoon. These little diversions can go a long way toward improving productivity.

6. Acknowledge Contributions

You can make a huge difference in employee morale by simply taking the time to recognize each employee’s contributions and accomplishments, large or small. Don’t take it for granted that your workers know they’ve done well — be generous with praise.

7. Provide Incentives

Offer people incentives to perform well, either with something small like a gift certificate or something more substantial such as a performance-based bonus or salary increase.

Also, give out “Employee of the Month” awards. Such tokens of appreciation will go far in motivating employees.

8. Honor Your Promises

Getting people to give their all requires following through on promises. If you tell an employee that they will be considered for a bonus if numbers improve or productivity increases, you’d better put your money where your mouth is. Failure to follow through on promises will result in a loss of trust — not only that person’s trust, but the trust of every employee who hears the story.

9. Provide Career Coaching

Help employees reach the next level professionally by providing on-site coaching. Bring in professionals to provide one-on-one counseling, which can help people learn how to overcome personal or professional obstacles on their career paths.

10. Match Tasks to Talents

You can improve employee motivation by improving employee confidence. Assign individuals with tasks you know they will enjoy or will be particularly good at. An employee who is successful at one thing will have the self-confidence to tackle other projects with renewed energy and excitement.

8 Deadly Ways to Kill Employee Motivation

Ref: http://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/8-deadly-ways-to-kill-employee-motivation.html

If you want to make sure you're providing your employees with an environment in which they can thrive, check your workplace for these motivation killers.

1. Toxic people.

If you've ever spent time with truly toxic people, you know how destructive and exhausting they can be. Toxic people spread negativity and suffocate the positive. Let them find a new home--or, if that's not possible, make sure policies and supervision are in place to minimize their damage.

2. No professional development.

Everyone needs to know that they are learning and growing. Without that, the workplace grows static and dull. Professional development for each of your employees allows them grow in their careers and also to know that both the organization and you have an investment in their success.

3. Lack of vision.

A clearly communicated vision sets direction and lets people know where to focus. Without it, even the best employees are less effective, because it's hard to excel if you don't understand the big picture.

4. Wasted time.

If you have the kind of workplace where meetings are called for no real reason and emails are sent to everyone with irrelevant information, it's likely that your workers are deeply frustrated. Show people you value them by showing them you value their time.

5. Inadequate communication.

When communication is poor, people spend half their time second-guessing what they're doing, critical tasks are missed, nonessential jobs are duplicated, information is locked into silos, and destructive rumors thrive. A clear flow of communication benefits everyone.

6. Vertical management.

If you can remember being in a situation where your ideas and input weren't valued or even heard, where it was "keep quiet and do what I say," you know how hard it is to do anything more than a grudging minimum. The more collaboration, the more investment and the more motivation.

7. Lack of appreciation.

When hard work or extraordinary results go unrecognized, when even everyday thanks are unexpressed, people grow uninspired and apathetic. You can reward your employees without spending a dime; it can be as simple as saying "thank you."

8. Bad leadership.

Bad leaders harm every member of their team and their entire organization. Even the best employees need effective leadership to excel. Start with developing your own leadership, then hire and grow the best leaders at every level. It's the best thing you can do to improve your workplace for everyone.

If you recognize any of these deathly killers in your workplace, it's up to you to do everything in your power to become part of the solution. Remember, great people do not stay long in bad workplaces.

6 Effective Ways to Enhance Workplace Productivity

Ref:  http://www.inc.com/john-boitnott/6-effective-ways-to-enhance-workplace-productivity.html

The need to ensure and enhance employee productivity is a reality no business can ignore. If you run a business you'll want to lean away from doing the mundane and routine when you can. However, it's inevitable that you'll encounter factors that may weaken or extinguish employee motivation and dampen productivity.

Obviously, you will need to mitigate these productivity-killers. The first thing to do is identify these factors, so you can consciously prevent them from emerging or aggravating. You should also be able to suppress them if they already exist. However, avoidance is not enough. A proactive stance is always preferable.

1. Get Rid of Motivation Killers

As mentioned earlier, there is a need to identify motivation killers in the workplace. A good manager will find ways to carefully observe the work environment in search of problem areas that adversely affect employee motivation. Typical motivation killers include toxic people, abrasive personalities, lack of organizational vision, absence of opportunities for professional development, poor communication systems, autocratic management styles, and the feeling of lack of appreciation. Addressing each of these requires a variety of approaches but there are ways to kill these motivation-killers.

2. Motivate through Gamification

Motivation is a very important factor in ensuring productivity. Unmotivated employees get bored especially when they are dealing with monotonous routines. Likewise, employees who lack motivation may not have the enthusiasm to complete challenging tasks. One effective way of motivating employees is through the use of gamification techniques. Tasks like completing reports or contributing ideas for projects and policy changes can be gamified to make them more appealing, exciting, or interesting.

Gamification involves the use of badges, rewards, leader boards or rankings, points, challenges, and other game elements to make repetitive and quantifiable tasks more engaging. Enterprise gamification platforms like GameEffective can be integrated with existing ERP, CRM or other enterprise applications, making it easier for employees to use these and get ahead in the game. These can be readily deployed to add a "play" dimension to various aspects of a business operation, like sales and customer service.

3. Set Clear Goals and Provide Feedback

Employees or personnel will be more motivated if they know what they are expected to achieve. Clearly stating goals or having a company vision provides guidance for everyone. Short-term goals, in particular, are effective in encouraging employees to properly manage their speed in doing tasks to meet targets. Additionally, it is important to provide feedback or show that employees are being supervised. Accomplishments should be acknowledged, while errors or failures in meeting targets should be promptly addressed. Good management practices can enhance and help maintain employee productivity.

4. Use Technology Responsibly

Refusing to leverage technology could be considered a grave mistake for any business. There are many technologies that significantly increase productivity in a workplace. To emphasize, using technology is not just about having computers and an Internet connection in the office. It's also important to study and utilize different hardware and software solutions that can improve employee productivity.

Collaborative applications like Asana can be very effective in making employees more productive, especially for organizations with geographically-distributed setups. Some employees do better if they are allowed to work in locations they find more comfortable, such as their homes. In other cases, travel is simply too expensive or time-consuming, and telecommuting, remote working or even co-working are viable options.

Increased mobility can break down barriers to productivity. Mobile devices enable access to communication and collaboration tools, as well as work-related documents and information. It is important, however, to prevent overly thinning the line between personal and professional lives. Work-life balance should be respected.

5. Set Standards and Provide Skills Development

In every business, it is important to establish standards. Employees should be familiar with what the company expects from them. They need to know what they should be doing as well as their assigned roles. Without clear or explicit expectations, people tend to find excuses when they fail to achieve targets. Be clear at the outset: define what you expect of everyone, and how you expect people to perform their assigned tasks and responsibilities.

Moreover, address the aspirational needs of employees by providing opportunities for developing skills or advancing professionally. Management should expect every employee to seek challenges, and to not want to be stagnant. It's not enough that they have mastered the skills needed to efficiently accomplish their current assignments. Let your employees realize that there are other things they can do, so that they can progress to higher positions. If you don't help employees develop professionally, that may become motivation for them to seek a new company.

6. Communicate Effectively and Efficiently

Communication, without a doubt, is a crucial aspect of business operations. Without an effective system of communication in place, you will have difficulty in achieving goals and even in functioning properly. Communication here, by the way, is not just the simple use of devices, such as phones or verbal and written exchanges of information. It is about designing and using communication systems that are appropriate for the needs of a business or company.

Effective and efficient communication means that employees should know the hierarchy and expertise within the company. They should know who to reach out to regarding their concerns.

In terms of tools, take advantage of modern platforms and applications available. Enterprise social networking tools such as Yammer make it easier for employees to contribute to institutional knowledge and help colleagues with onboarding. Cloud-based office suites like Office 365 help contribute to a culture of sharing and helping across the enterprise.

Maintaining and enhancing productivity in the workplace is not always very easy to accomplish but it can also be boiled down to some simple concepts. Here are three key things to remember: the need for employee motivation, the proactive involvement of managers, and the use of technologies and systems that greatly help employees in doing their work more efficiently. If you thoughtfully execute plans with those concepts in mind, you are on the right track.