When it comes to keeping your employees motivated, there are a variety of strategies companies rely on to help them do their dirty work. Since I’m always curious about what makes people tick (and since it’s kind of my job to figure it out), lately I’ve been calling on my friends to help me learn.
Despite working in extremely dissimilar fields, my friends’ answers to the question “What incentives really motivate you at work?” have been remarkably similar. Here are some strategies lifted from the ad hoc Incentives Research Project I’ve completed over drinks in the past few months.
Inducing Competition
All My Friends Agree: Inducing healthy competition among your employees is a great way to entice them to perform at a higher level. By healthy competition, I mean the type of situation that occurs when, say, managers publicly praise and/or reward an employee for a job well done. In the best of circumstances (and as long as you’re sincere), rewarding and giving props to a deserving employee should encourage everyone else to aim high, engender trust that you really appreciate hard work, and motivate a repeat performance through promise of a fitting reward.
Making It Work: A great way to keep your employees olympically in-shape and competitive is to 1) set realistic standards and attainable goals, 2) give regular and constructive feedback on work performance, and 3) provide positive and sincere reinforcement, in public, when someone does something that truly rocks.
Being Open to Constructive Feedback
All My Friends Agree: Feeling ‘empowered’ is instrumental to staying motivated, and a boss or companies’ openness to constructive feedback plays an important role in attaining that goal. Knowing your voice will be heard and your opinion matters makes everyone feel more competent, valued, and confident — and confident employees are more likely to work harder and make good, well thought-out choices. Similarly, respect is a two-way street: The more you give the more you’re likely to get.
Making It Work: If you want to empower your employees by giving them a voice, designating a forum or space where suggestions are welcome is a great starting point (We use Basecamp—surprise, surprise). Identifying and attending to your employees’ best attributes—and actively inviting feedback that corresponds with those strengths—is also very helpful.
Being The Change You Want To See
All My Friends Agree: Leading by example is a great way to help your employees stand and deliver. When they see you working hard and being positive, they’re more likely to work hard and be positive too. Similarly, acting on your motivations is likely to produce changes that will benefit your team, so everyone’s positively reinforced and gloriously inspired by your fearless leadership skills.
Making It Work: If you want to set a certain tone or enact a sweeping change in your company, simply embodying the values you’d like your employees to adopt is a great idea. At the same time, learning how to properly delegate tasks (which often corresponds to learning how to slow down and get organized) will ensure you maintain a balanced workload and help you avoid a self-inflicted martyr complex.
Following S.O.P’s
All My Friends Agree: Having a few standard operating procedures in place to keep your work environment steady and consistent can help motivate your employees by making them feel secure. And of course, calm employees who feel like they know what to expect tend to be happier and more productive.
Making It Work: If you want to set up some standard operation procedures, go for it! But before you go all Betty Bureaucracy on us, first consult reality or better yet — first consult practicality. Questions like: Are my rules tenable? Are they typical for my industry? Do people actually meet the expectations I put in place? Is my system so inflexible that few of the changes I’d like to make happen, happen? Et cetera. Once you’ve done the diagnostics, deciding which rules to enact will be easier and more efficacious.
The Bottomline
It’s difficult to be self-motivated all the time, and even more difficult to inspire motivation in others. Focusing on the experience of your employees (and clients) and reading their signs is a great way to begin learning how to best wield positive influence. And of course, giving sincere positive reinforcement where appropriate is a great way of making people feel happy about working — as well as inspiring confidence that you’re a fair-minded leader.
Incentives work best when they’re emotionally based. I think all your examples are like that.