A company is nothing without its workforce. It cannot achieve the desired goals and objectives without the assistance of its workers. A business owner or employer should make it a point to motivate and challenge the people they employ because without that they cannot see their company growing.
As an employer, it is your responsibility to engage and motivate your workforce because if the employees are treated right and managed well, they will exhibit outstanding performance. Consequently, the company will witness overall growth and success.
On the other hand, if you fail to motivate your employees and only focus on monitoring their activities using a spy phone app or monitoring software, you are most likely to witness a decline in the turnover or see your employees leaving the company.
To save your company from falling into chaos, you must motivate your employees and encourage them to work as partners in the company. Of course, it doesn’t mean you have granted them ownership in the company but it does mean that you have allowed your employees to personally invest in the company’s growth and development.
When employees are made to believe that they are, in fact, partners in the company and that their combined skills and talent can bring a lot to the business, it will build a sense of partnership and trust among them.
Motivating and challenging employees start with determining the different factors that influence each worker’s workday. Once you have understood them, you can decide how to challenge your employees without stressing them out. Let’s go through some effective ways you can adopt to keep your employees motivated and challenged.
Provide Consistent Feedback
The first effective way that you can adopt to motivate your employees is to provide them consistent feedback about their performance at work. There’s no doubt that praising them can be a helpful motivator but providing constructive criticism is also necessary to push them to make improvements in areas that could need some attention.
We wouldn’t suggest waiting for an annual review meeting to offer them feedback. You should schedule check-ins or regular short meetings to provide praise and criticism about your employees’ performances. This signifies that you pay a lot of attention to your business, objectives, and employees.
Talk About Problems Affecting the Company
Sometimes managers and business owners fail to come up with the best solutions. It is often seen that they come from the employees that have been working in the company for a long time. For that reason, it is considered a good idea to keep everyone in the workplace informed whenever problems and issues arise.
You should allow employees to speak up about the solutions that they think might help solve a problem. For that, you need to give them enough confidence and trust.
Ask for Suggestions and Solutions
If you believe in providing consistent feedback to your employees about their performance, you should also be willing to receive it from them. Empower your employees to provide you with ideas that may fix the issues in the workplace. For instance, if there is a problem in the computer system, let your employees take care of that before calling for professional help.
Also, allow them to suggest new programs and software and then let them develop them so that it can help take the business to the next level. It’s important that you keep challenging them to make the business grow and become even better than what it was.
Allow Employees to Define Their Duties
We know this could sound scary at first, but trust us, it’s not. When you bring a new employee on board, they understand that they have to fulfill certain tasks and duties to remain employed in the company. Their duties are already predefined and they just have to follow them.
However, sometimes they are asked to perform duties that come out of nowhere. For instance, there may be an event where an employee has to volunteer. On the other hand, they may be asked to design an outlet standee for an upcoming exhibition when the graphic designer is not available. Or perhaps they may be required to do some painting or fix a computer.
In such scenarios, employers can always ask for volunteers and then let them define their duties. Employees will feel happier accepting non-routine tasks especially if they happen to be of their interest.
Reward Your Employees
You cannot motivate your employees if you do not reward or encourage them from time to time. They probably won’t even stick around for long if you keep on challenging them without offering any reward.
Now, this doesn’t mean a reward could be only about money. You can also use non-monetary rewards and incentives such as flexible work timings, employee discounts, bonuses, and recognition programs (such as employee of the month). Using these incentives, you can reward them for a job well done.
Employees are the backbone of the business. Without them, you cannot expect your company to thrive. It’s a good idea to monitor their performance using a mobile spy app or monitoring software to see if they are actually working but you should also trust them enough to handle a task and motivate them to do it.
Therefore, as an employer and boss of the company, you need to create an environment that encourages and recognizes the hard work put in by the employees who are working their best to expand your business.
Infographic provided by Halock Security Labs, a penetration testing company
