Business owners and executives spend a lot of time thinking about their customers, but sometimes that forget about their internal customers: their employees. How do you keep them enthused about the work they’re doing, about the company, and possibly even about you? When it comes to staff motivation, are you promoting or diminishing it? To create a positive office culture, it’s important to embrace some best practice that are associated with positive employee motivation.
Prioritize Work-Life Balance
Many companies can’t afford to pay out bonuses, even to their best employees. But employees are expecting more from their jobs than just a paycheck. Many employers have started offering perks that improve work-life balance, such as late-start days and flexible scheduling. Overall, these employers are finding that these practices enhance their employees’ feelings about their place of work. Work-life balance can help prevent burnout at the office and reduce chronic stress.
Create Rituals for Personal Recognition
You can enhance workplace morale by offering routine personal recognition. You might begin each meeting by pointing out individual success stories that occurred over the week, or you might end each week by announcing employee achievements. Recognize employees for their contributions to the organization. This will promote your team to keep striving to achieve their professional and personal goals.
Dump the Gimmicks
Gamification is a terrific way to promote your employees to meet goals. However, gimmicky rewards that are difficult to understand can backfire. For example, sales commissions have a notoriously negative reputation when based on non-transparent mathematics. In these situations, your employees aren’t sure how to calculate their earnings and can quickly become frustrated. Treat your employees with respect and be transparent and fair about rewards.
Be Positive
It may seem simplistic, but by modeling positivity, you can set the tone for your entire organization. There are a million ways to show positivity, which means you have lots of options. Face challenges with positivity rather than fear. If a setback occurs, show positivity by looking for new roads to success rather than dwelling on the adverse outcomes. You might even talk to your employees about how all of you, together, can improve behaviors and attitudes through positive measures.
Keep the above tips in mind to effectively motivate your employees to do their best work. When your team is positively motivated, the organization will radiate with that positivity–and the successes are likely to grow. If your office culture is swirling in negativity, you can change it. Each week, try to focus on improving one aspect of your office culture. Over time and with commitment, you can enhance the workplace experience for everyone.
Nothing in your business is as important as your people, but building and leading a team brings challenges. At StaffScapes, we can help you meet the challenges in HR by helping you provide excellent (and affordable) benefits, manage risk, and by handling workers comp and complete payroll processing.
That lets you increase profitability, maximize productivity, reduce time spent on transactional HR activities, reduce employment-related liability, and ultimately lower labor costs, while boosting morale at work, and improving employee satisfaction and retention.
If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to one of our PEO experts today.