You walk into work on a Monday morning and your entire team is bogged down with the dreaded Monday morning blues. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to ensure your team is feeling well and the team members are motivated to work. Employee motivation forms an important part of leadership. To inspire the workforce to go above and beyond is a challenge to all leaders. Motivating employees to stay engaged is the responsibility of leaders. Employee motivation can be considered an art too.
Every manager grapples with the challenge of keeping employees motivated, but good managers know that employee motivation is key to overall success. There might not be a sure-shot formula to create inspiration and keep your employees engaged, but some tricks have seemed to work in the past. These tricks can have a major, lasting effect on workplace motivation and productivity. So here are 5 principles of motivation that you as a manager can employ to keep your team members motivated and productive.
Before we delve deeper into how to keep your employees motivated, let’s take a look at the Hierarchy of Needs or the Needs Theory by Abraham Maslow, a motivational theory in psychology. It provides an understanding of the psychological principles that guide employee motivation and throws light on the concept of motivation itself. These can be understood as principles that guide employee motivation.
The needs theory suggests identifying internal factors that motivate an individual’s behavior and is based on the premise that people are motivated by unfulfilled needs. Needs are psychological or physiological insufficiencies that provoke some type of behavioral response. The needs a person has can range from weak to strong and can vary based on environmental factors, time and place. Often these needs serve as a motivating factor influencing employee behavior.
According to Abraham Maslow, motivation is the result of a person’s attempt at fulfilling five basic needs: physiological, safety, social, esteem and self-actualization. These five needs drive motivation levels.
Physiological needs: Such as air, food, water, shelter, clothing and sleep. If you help your team members find their physiological needs like providing conducive working conditions, good working hours and breaks and eating breaks, the team will be more motivated to perform better.
Safety needs: These needs provide a person with a sense of security and well-being. Personal security, financial security, protection from harm and accidents-these classify under safety needs.
Esteem needs: Needs such as self-esteem and respect, with self-respect being slightly more important than gaining respect and admiration from others.
Self-actualization needs: A person’s need to reach his or her full potential. The need to become what one is capable of is something that is highly personal.
Here are some of the ways in which leaders can motivate their teams.
Have open communication: It’s important to have open and meaningful communication with your staff in order to keep them motivated to stay engaged. Keep in mind to be approachable and receptive. Open communication is a cornerstone of employee motivation.
Applying methods of establishing effective communication with your team will do wonders for your staff’s motivation.
You can do this by showing you care. A motivated employee who is invested in their work will naturally have questions, comments and concerns. Have an open-door policy that keeps lines of communication open. This will help your employees feel as though their input matters. Have an open-door policy that can help you understand your staff better. Dedicate some time during morning meetings to help people voice their concerns and requests. Following up with your employees will show them you care and that will motivate them to perform better. Motivating employees to stay engaged is a key responsibility.
Encourage innovation through focus on Agile working:
When working in an agile work environment, producing quality and quantity work is important. This kind of work requires a ton of creative thinking and that’s when employee motivation comes into play. Employee motivation is important to take risks and be innovative, even if it means they will make a mistake now and then. One of the keys to working in an agile work environment is when your employees aren’t afraid to fail. They will be able to generate better work that could potentially set your organization apart from the competition.
Stay understanding and positive:
When working with a team, they can easily reflect your mood, so it’s important to stay positive. That will help your team follow your lead. If your energy is positive and good, your employees will be happy to come to work and be happy to work with you. Stay passionate about your work and that will ensure your team stays happy, too.
Incentivise your workplace:
Ensuring you provide rewards when goals are achieved is a great way to get your staff to go above and beyond their work. Employee motivation can be boosted when your job is fun and gratifying. Employee motivation will show an upward graph when their job is fun and gratifying.
You’ll realize that motivated employees make for a fun and enjoyable workplace. It’s an indispensable aspect of success and productivity. These simple guidelines based on psychological principles of motivation can help you cultivate employee motivation and enthusiasm at your workplace. With these principles of motivation, leaders can motivate the workforce to go above and beyond.
Sailaja Manacha, a Master certified Coach from ICF, is known for her programs and coaching methods that combine psychology with leadership practices. In her work, Sailaja draws from Psychology, Ontology, NLP and Spiritual frameworks as well as rich, real-world experiences.
