Innovative Ways to Motivate Employees

6 years ago | Posted in: Business | 748 Views

Motivating employees to produce more and waste less company time is a huge problem in the modern workplace. Too many Millennials live in some type of idealistic world with an unrealistic idea of what it means to work for a living. When the work environment is not overly accommodating to their entitlement filled expectations, they tend to lack productivity. This has become more of a problem as more Millennials and their children are replacing Boomers and Generation X workers in the workplace.

For this reason, business owners must be more clever when it comes to ways to motivate their employees to stay productive from one quarter to the next.

Give Your Company to Your Employees

It may seem like a crazy idea at first, but the notion of giving your company to your employees may be one of the most innovative ways to motivate employees to stay productive and push ahead your company’s success. According to Inc.com, this idea involves padding your employees retirement accounts with corporate stock.

This way the employees have a reason to make sure the company is operating at peak performance, because their motivation to stay productive counts in huge ways towards their eventual retirement. Before attempting something like this, it is likely going to be necessary to consider a time frame for offering this stock option to employees.

This option is motivating, but you do not want someone walking out with loads of stock after only working for your company for a few months. You want to use this option to leverage loyalty to your company too, not just increased motivation and productivity. You may want to offer more stock perks through some type of time-based employee incentive program. This way, people who stay longer become deeper and deeper invested into the company and its success.

Change the Work Environment

How an employee feels about the work environment can play a huge role in their motivation and productivity rates. According to the Huffington Post, a few ways to address this problem boils down to focusing on employee needs. Some employees work better if they are allowed to surround themselves with pictures from home and even the type of music they enjoy listening to in their own office.

Having some autonomy in how they decorate their office makes the work environment feel like it belongs to them in some ways, and so they feel more at home when they are at work. Adding perks like a game room, better coffee and exercise machines can help get an employees blood pumping and ready to give more at their job. Often the lack of person to person engagement and the lack of physical movement just causes employees to lag in the early morning and later afternoon hours especially.

Build a Job-Secure Workplace

In the past managers and employers motivate their employees by micromanaging and threatening their jobs. According to Forbes, a workplace that pressures towards job insecurity is particularly counterproductive to pushing for increased motivation in today’s job market. To encourage greater motivation, today’s employees want to know they are valued, not have their job threatened around every corner. By making modern employees insecure about their level of expendability in a job, an employer is basically pushing employees to search for a new job elsewhere.

With the job search process being so overwhelmingly web-based today, this makes it easier for employees to jump on new job opportunities the moment they feel insecure in their job and not reassured that they are a valued member of the company. Ever since employers moved away from conducting more personal interviews to relying on less personalized Internet application and hiring practices, this attempt at saving time by looking at less of the available candidates in the hiring pool has lead to more problems bringing genuinely motivated workers into their companies.

Consequently, it makes sense for companies to return to conducting broader numbers of personal interviews to figure out which candidates are truly motivated to work already, so that so much money does not need to be spent motivating the unmotivated workers they currently hire on at the company’s expense.

Conclusion

Since companies have become less personalized in their hiring practices, the modern corporate environment suffers with an overwhelming problem of having to figure out how to motivate poorly vetted employees. If more interest was taken to hire employees who were already motivated to work hard towards success, companies would have less problems in this area of operations. Yet, even still, some level of proactive push needs to be made even with motivated workers to keep their motivation consistent from one quarter to the next. This is just good business, and it is good for the employees too.

 

Author Bio:  Jeremy is a tech and business writer from Simi Valley, CA. He’s worked for Adobe, Google, and himself. He lives for success stories, and hopes to be one someday.

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