Six ways to keep employees happy and motivated

It can feel unrewarding to work hard and keep achieving goals without any recognition of these achievements so motivate your staff with regular rewards. 

 

This could mean giving a monthly bonus or pay rise, or setting up an ‘employee of the month’ scheme, which gives company-wide recognition and a physical or financial reward for winning the accolade. It’s all about saying thank you and actively praising employees for meeting milestones. 

One of the best incentives you can offer is clear career progression. After all, one of the main reasons that good employees leave is because they run out of options or start to think there is no more room for progression in your company. 

 

Communicate with members of your team and commit to helping them become even more brilliant at their job. Ask whether they would like extra training, or maybe time off for conferences. Also be prepared for employees requesting career development moves. If you can give your employees something more than just the nine to five routine, you’ll have a more loyal workforce, and the length of service from your employees will flourish. 

If your staff feel ignored, they will quickly lose motivation and become less productive within your workforce. Setting up clear channels of honest, genuine communication will not only make each member of the team feel like you’re interested in their opinions but will also provide you with a useful way to stay in touch with them. 

 

Giving your employees a voice and taking on board their opinions will benefit you as well, as you’ll open up a new stream of ideas, thoughts and questioning that will be useful when it comes to improving your business and updating your business plan. 

Most employees work efficiently when they know they are getting paid well. If they feel like they are underpaid for the work being done, they will usually leave. Therefore, it’s important to regularly assess your salary levels to ensure your company is paying industry standards at minimum. 

 

Other benefits to consider include pre-paid childcare, sports memberships or a particular number of hours per week that can be worked from home. If you have a shared online platform for your employees, you could have a ‘Highlights’ page where you post about individuals’ effective team work or strong organisation, for example, and each employee mentioned on the page could go into a monetary prize draw at the end of the month. 

Remember that it should never be all work and no play. Another reason for employee attrition is when work overwhelms everything else in your employees’ lives and the all-important work/life balance becomes thrown off or disappears altogether. Long hours and relentless schedules can worryingly result in employee burnout, which often means losing your best team members to a better-balanced workplace. 

 

There are smaller things that can be done, such as ensuring staff take their lunch break instead of working through it, but also consider offering flexible working hours, too. 

Is your employee lazy or bored? If you find yourself questioning an employee’s mind-set, it will often be the case that they’re feeling unproductive or demotivated because their role is too easy. 

 

Don’t under-use your staff! Hand over more responsibility wherever you can. If you’re unsure what type of extra responsibility to give employees, ask what they’re interested in, what else they’d like to learn and what they like to do outside of work. Maybe they could spend two hours per week in the company’s marketing department, taking responsibility for some of the advertising content? This would be sure-fire way of providing more responsibility and offering more room for personal and workplace development. 

Put these six steps into action and you’ll notice that your employees are happy and motivated. Running a company is all about maintaining productivity as well as thinking about each employee as an individual with their own aspirations. Career prospects, a reliable rewards system, genuine communication and giving credit will provide a firm basis for great working relationships.