subject: Motivating Employees [print this page] Motivating employees in your workplace is important to ensure that they are engaged and productive, giving you their best every day. Engaged employees are more productive and less likely to leave their current employers. It is important that if you have employees that are not totally engaged in your workplace, that you put in place ways of motivating them and having them aspire to better performance.
All employees appreciate receiving recognition for the contribution they make to the business. Recognising good performance or positive behaviours (like customer service or having a positive work attitude) is a good way of building a positive and collaborative team culture. Performance recognition can happen in many ways. The most common is the provision of a commission or tips to employees for sales or service. With a highly competitive labour market, it is becoming more important than ever for employers to consider more consistent and sophisticated methods of rewarding and motivating employees.
For most employees money is a welcome reward for performance, but it may surprise you to learn that over 78% of employees would spend their bonus money on paying bills and other debts hardly a lasting reminder of their good performance. To provide employees with a longer lasting reminder of their performance, many employers are now considering rewarding employees with adventures, gift products and services that are tailored to the specific tastes of the employee. For example, several hotels that have high levels of university students working for them have introduced performance incentives around paying for those employees HECS fees if they meet service and sales standards. Other businesses are offering employees holidays, day trips, books, facials and spa retreats, in order to motivate them.
There are several keys to rewarding performance and motivating employees:
1. Establish some clearly defined performance measures, or key performance indicators, that are tangible and measurable.
2. Communicate clearly to the employees what is expected of them and the desired level of performance of their duties.
3. Ensure that employees understand what rewards are available to them for meeting or exceeding their performance goals.
4. Undertake regular performance reviews with employees so they know how they are tracking against their targets (you may want to consider quarterly reviews).
5. Dont forget, performance indicators do not have to be individual, you can establish business goals, team goals and individual goals to ensure everyone understands that their role contributes to the overall organisational performance.
6. Celebrate the wins openly with all employees. This will allow those who miss their performance rewards to aspire towards being celebrated in the next round, as well as providing public recognition of the great performance of those who are hitting their targets.
By implementing these simple methods in your business you will be able to successfully engage and motivate employees on an on-going basis. You will experience increased productivity and efficiency, quicker project turnover and you may even realise lower costs as employees are more likely to make decisions that will benefit the company as their loyalty towards the company increases
