How to motivate employees: 10 Essential Strategies

The most important factor for success in an organization are its employees, their motivation and the degree to which they are productive at achieving the companies goals. If a manager or CEO is able to find the right employees, motivate them and ensure that they are all moving in the same direction, most of the problems in an organization are solved.

This sounds easier than it is in reality. The following 10 strategies are the foundation for a very productive team or organization.

1. Set BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goals

Nothing motivates employees more than knowing that they are working for an important goal. The term „big hairy audacious goal“ was created by Jim Collins in his book „Built to Last“. Nobody wants to work hard to „increase sales“ to „lower costs“ or to „improve synergies“. Everyone wants to work on goals that give meaning to our work life. That‘s why Apple‘s BHAG is not to become the biggest company in the world, they want to create the best computers in the world. SpaceX does not want to beat Nasa on prices for space launches, it wants to be the first company to bring humans to Mars. With these kind of goals employees find meaning and a reason to work hard.

2. Clear Roadmap

Big, visionary goals are great but it doesn‘t mean that one can skip the tasks to create a detailed and clear roadmap for the next weeks and months ahead. A clear roadmap is the connection between visionary goals and projects that get implemented in an organization. If it is not clear what the roadmap is, it is not clear what the daily task should be. If employees don‘t know what is expected from them and what they should do next to move closer to get ambitious goals it‘s very hard to give your best and very difficult to do a good job.

3. Clear Expectations

The road map defines how the company will implement the missionary goal. Every employee needs to contribute to the company‘s goals and clear expectations need to be defined so that employees know what they have to do. If these expectations are not clearly defined employees not only put their effort in the wrong areas, but they also never know if they‘re doing a good job. This lack of confirmation as well as not knowing how an employee is contributing to the company‘s success leads to dissatisfaction and a lack of motivation.

4. Provide a Career Path

Goals for an organization are important. Even more important are goals for individuals and their career development keep employees motivated and interested in work. One thing to keep in mind is that not every body can become a manager. Of course not everybody wants become a manager. An organization should therefore allow for management careers, but also for non-management careers for example as a specialists or experts in certain domains.

5. Lead by Example

A manager cannot expect his employees to deliver highest performance if he is not willing to show this behaviour by himself. Jonathan Ive, Chief Designer at Apple, once said the reason why Steve Jobs was always critical of the performance and putting so much effort into the company is because he cared more than anyone else in the company to achieve the ambitious goals he set. If a manager is not willing to put in the effort necessary to lead his employees by example, the best is to get out of the way and find somebody who is willing to do it.

6. Create Autonomy

Once employees know which goal they should achieve, the role of the manager is to help them develop plan so they can achieve these goals by themselves. A manager should never try to do things by himself, instead he should empower and help employees to do to things by themselves. It‘s important to communicate that employees have full autonomy to work on a goal and contribute their part within the company. Micromanaging bosses are the nightmare for every employee and this behaviour is also the worst a manager can do to increase the performance in his team. The simple reason is that once you start helping employees with their work, they will stop to try and reach goals by themselves. At the end this leads to less autonomy for the employees and more work for the manager.

7. Share Success

Successes in the company should not just be celebrated by top management, they should be celebrated within the whole company. These kind of celebrations are the glue to that will help the team stick together. They will help teams to stick together and push through because they will have a common memory and experience of the last time they have achieved a similar outcome.

8. Recognizing Performance

If individual employees go beyond themselves and deliver a performance that exceeded the managements expectations, it is necessary to recognize this performance in front of the individual employee but also in front of other employees. It‘s important not to turn this into a game of who is the best employee. Another critical issue is to ensure that whenever an individual employee gets recognized for his performance that he was actually the one in charge for that. Nothing demotivates more than watching somebody else receive the recognition for a success that you have been working on very hard.

9. Physical Work Environment

If you expect your employees to be motivated and work hard then it is necessary to create an environment that facilitates such a feeling. Motivational posters on the wall are not the right answer. Instead you should allow employees to create their own physical work environment by giving them a small budget that they can spend to personalize their workspace. It turns out that with a hundred dollars spent an employee can create a personalized environment and he will feel more willing to spend time at work.

10. Remove negative employees

There are employees who are energizing and help other employees to achieve more. At the same time there are employees who have a bad influence on a team‘s motivation and literally drown the energy of everybody all else on the team. If you have to deal with such an employee it‘s best to remove them and ensure that there is no negative influence anymore.

These are some of the 10 most essential strategies to motivate your employees and keep them engaged at work. If you‘re doing just a few of them right, you will see significant improvement and decrease in motivation, loyalty, and performance by your employees.

Bernhard S