Motivate Employees in Three Easy Steps

Successful business leaders are always looking for new ways to motivate employees, and it's not hard to see why. A motivated workforce will improve productivity without any major investments in new systems, equipment, or infrastructure. When you motivate employees, it's like a free boost to the company's bottom line. Take the following three steps for developing and managing employees who are motivated and eager to act in the company's interests.

If you're looking to motivate employees, the first step has to be getting to know them. Without a baseline for what your workers want, your attempts to motivate employees will almost certainly be off target. Halfhearted or misguided attempts to motivate employees often have the opposite effect of lowering company morale and dragging down productivity.

If you genuinely want to know what your employees are thinking, it helps to create safe spaces where they can speak their minds. Try creating a company blog where workers can—anonymously or otherwise—share their hopes, complaints, and improvement ideas with other employees. This has the additional benefit of fostering greater community among workers and improving teamwork.

Implementing a company-wide discussion forum is a good second step for motivating employees. Use the forum to inform your workforce of what's going on in management. By delivering messages to the entire workforce and asking for input during decision cycles, you're managing employees in such a way as to bestow a sense of ownership over their work. This makes individual workers feel that the success of the company is up to them. Keeping your staff informed also shows respect for their intelligence and capabilities, which can help your efforts to motivate employees.

That sense of ownership is the third step to a motivated workforce. Think back to a time before you entered management, or think about how hard you worked today. The motivation that gets you out of bed early every day to get a head start on work that needs doing is your sense of ownership. Hourly workers tend to lack this all-important virtue as a result of a pay structure that alienates them from the fruits of their labor. It's true that bad work will be discovered, or the company will fail and take underperforming employees with it. However, these consequences are too negative and too remote to provide real motivating power.

Employees need to be working toward something, as opposed to just putting in hours. Evaluate the structure of your company's incentives for opportunities to directly reward workers for their work. The more they feel responsible for success, the harder they'll work for it, which is the essence of a successful initiative to motivate employees.

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