Driving the motivation of your employees is the key to an organisation’s success. It may be defined as the level of commitment and energy your employees exhibit daily. Without motivated employees, organisations often face lower productivity and an inability to reach critical business goals.
If you want to avoid being one of those organisations, you need to find out how to drive your employees’ motivation. Driving motivation is not the easiest thing to do; however, advanced employee engagement software might be beneficial in monitoring and nurturing employee motivation.
Is there a single best way to drive motivation, and how can an employee experience platform make this challenging task easier? Read on to find out.
The Best Way(s) to Motivate Employees
What’s up with the brackets? We hate to break it to you, but there is no single best way to motivate employees as if with a wave of a wand. The most effective way to drive motivation is by stimulating intrinsic motivation, such as the feeling of success at work while offering extrinsic motivation through fair financial rewards and employee perks.
In short, you first have to ensure you have covered the basic requirements – rightful pay, the usual employee benefits and good working conditions. While fair pay and benefits are still one of the strongest motivating drivers, employees nowadays crave more than that. Numerous studies show that these factors are followed closely and sometimes even surpassed by employees’ need to feel recognised for their work.
Combining these two drivers – fair tangible reward and employee recognition – is a proven way to increase employee motivation and improve the employee experience with your company.
5 Tips on How to Create a Culture of Recognition
Research shows that 93% of employees who feel appreciated at work are motivated to deliver the best results. So, let’s imagine you have the first point covered, and there is nothing more you can do with pay and benefits. Yet, your employees lack motivation. Here are the five effective ways of recognition to add to your employee motivation management strategy.
1. Be specific
Recognition is more effective when linked to an employee’s specific accomplishment. Specific recognition encourages the employees to continue their positive behaviour and strong performance. When giving recognition, always explain what it is for. Neglecting recognition might cause best-performing employees to lose motivation; therefore, you should have a detailed overview of employee performance and always appreciate those who achieved a specific business objective. An online employee engagement software such as Staffino can help you track employee performance and their personal KPIs and identify those who should be rewarded/recognised for their efforts.
2. Be timely
Recognition that arrives weeks or months after an employee’s achievement isn’t nearly as meaningful as a few encouraging words received promptly. The longer managers wait to recognise employees, the less effective it is. So, how do you prioritise employee recognition in your busy work schedule? Try an employee motivation management platform, which allows you to give real-time recognition to employees shortly after receiving positive customer feedback.
3. Add the fun element
Have you heard of employee gamification? It’s a way of digital recognition where front-line employees earn fun digital badges for their achievements. Not only does it boost employees’ positive energy and productivity through a healthy race, but it also helps you uncover the strong communication points of each employee. Deploying an effective employee gamification programme is a great way to give meaningful recognition in a fun way, which helps employees blow off some steam during their daily work routine.
4. Offer personalised incentives
In addition to the abovementioned ways of employee recognition, it is a good idea to give tangible rewards to those who scored highly or achieved specific KPIs and business goals. From our experience, pairing outstanding employee performance with monthly incentives such as an extra day off, a salary bonus, discounts, or gift cards encourages the best employees to continue their good work while motivating others to improve their performance. To deliver the best possible employee experience, get to know your employees and their individual motivation drivers. This will allow you to give personalised rewards which work best in driving employee motivation.
5. Align employees with the company’s vision
Let your employees know your organisation’s values and explain how their achievements contribute to their team’s and the organisation’s overall success. Share regular news about how the organisation is reaching its vision, and make clear how individual employee performance relates to that vision.
Final Word
Keep in mind that you cannot use one key for every lock. Managers should first accurately identify the reason for the employee’s lack of motivation and then decide on the right strategy. Therefore, getting to know your employees and holding regular review sessions should be the core of your employee motivation management. It allows you to encourage employees and give meaningful recognition while understanding their needs, which may uncover new ideas for improving the overall employee experience.