Hiring your first employee or set of employees is a big step. You want to make sure that you help your new hires maximize their performance. This can be a challenge because effectively managing people is difficult and nobody's born knowing how to do it.
Employee motivation can be directly linked to increased productivity. Sometimes, simply receiving a paycheck is not enough of an incentive to keep employees dedicated and focused. Managers must think of new ways to hold an employee's attention and interest on a project, or the company.
There are both positive and negative reinforcements for motivating employees.
An example of positive reinforcement is when companies select an employee as "Employee of the Week”. This praises the winning employee, while positively encouraging other employees to keep trying to do well. While, an example of negative reinforcement could be when a company issues a written-warning or query to get employees to perform a certain way or restrict certain actions.
Some simple, but time-tested ways to motivate and engage your employees are:
1. Set appropriate goals
Goal setting is essential. It helps employees to prioritize their activities and focus their efforts. When setting goals with employees, it is critical that they be SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic Time and resource bound). The goals must also be meaningful to the employee. This will ensure that achieving their unique goal will rise to the top of the employees “to-do” list.
2. Develop a plan to achieve the goals
After setting goals with the employee, put together a plan to achieve them. To accomplish a goal, the employee will need to commit to a specified set of actions. A goal without an action plan will end up undone. It’s equally important to have a timeline that shows when the employee will complete each action step. This will create the urgency necessary to get the work done in a timely manner. This can be done easily with task management apps such as Asana or Trello.
3. Empower the employee
To maximize the probability that your employees achieve their goals, you must empower them. Empowering employees means three things. First, you must properly train your workers to do the tasks necessary to achieve their goals. Then you will need to motivate your people. There should be rewards for success and consequences for failure. This can be as simple as ordering pizza for the team on Friday after a long week, as some Nigerian ad agencies do. Also, you should remove roadblocks your employees face (both administrative and personal) that are within the company’s control.
4. Set reasonable KPIs to assess performance and make adjustments
The next thing to do is assess performance and make necessary changes. Apart from the annual performance evaluations, an effective management checks performance much more frequently. For employees that are new to the organization or learning a new task, you may need to assess performance frequently which is mostly daily. Employees who have demonstrated competence may only require weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly meetings to discuss performance.
5. Get regular employee feedback
Sometimes, your team may know the nuances of the day-to-day work activities in a way that you, the CEO/owner might not. That is why it is recommended that employee feedback be collected before, during, and after making decisions about the workplace. This way, employees feel ownership over and respect for the space, which translates into loyalty for the company and improved performance.
6. Minimize bureaucracy
One of the most frustrating walls an employee encounters is requiring permission to do their job, time and time again. Yes, there are security reasons for some measures, but often, old policies from insecure supervisors or managers trying to hoard power have led to the establishment of "the way things have always been done" inertia, which keeps bad rules in place. If you think what is suggested is a bad idea, ask them to explain the justification for the idea and listen. Chances are there may be something valuable that idea can add to the company’s runnings.
In all, it is best to put a consistent motivation system in place before you begin hiring employees.
