Motivate Employees In The Workplace

Even the most skilled employee can underperform if they’re not sufficiently driven. Motivation—
the employee’s intrinsic drive to work—is the real catalyst for increased productivity. Discover
several tried and true tips for putting this catalyst into action.

1. Keep Your Employees In The Loop

Keeping employees in the dark about the company's mid-term goals and
directions can be extremely demotivational. It makes employees feel like simple
cogs in the corporate machine—cogs that need not concern themselves with
anything beyond their explicitly assigned tasks.

Instead, be open with your employees. Explain to them the company's goals and
strategies, and how you plan to achieve them, and warn them about any
problems that the company might be facing in advance. You don’t need to give
them full access or provide total transparency into your secret business plans.
Just keep them in the loop for stuff that they’ll soon need to deal with anyway.
For example, you should discuss the company's upcoming projects and deadlines
with them in advance, instead of letting them know about them at the last
minute.

If it's possible, try to include them in the decision making—at least for things that
will directly affect them. Treating your workers like an organic part of the
company, and showing them that their opinion matters, works wonders for
motivating employees in the workplace. It will help turn your employees from
bored office drones into active contributors.

2. Ask Them About Their Pain Points

You know what will really motivate your employees? No? Why not just ask them,
then?

Each one might have a different thing to say, but if you put all of their answers
together, you will have a clearer picture of what the biggest motivational killers
are in your company. (And conversely, you’ll discover several new ways to
motivate your employees).
The mechanics of gathering their feedback are easy.

You can:

 use some office collaboration tool (like Trello or Slack) to set a poll
 have them write their pain points (preferably anonymously)
 run an online survey using your LMS platform
 just go into their desks and ask them
Don't forget the trickiest part though: fixing those things. A lot of companies
gather employee feedback, and then they just let it sit, doing nothing with it.
Don't be like them. You don't have to fix everything an employee complains
about, of course. You should promptly address, however, anything that's brought
up by many employees or anything that immediately strikes you as important.
Sometimes, the secret to motivating employees in the workplace is to simply
remove the things that demotivate them.

3. Leverage Gamification

Adults are children too. Or, rather, we all have an inner child, that still likes
playing the occasional game. Gamification takes advantage of these gaming
urges to make us do things and create new habits. And adding gamified
elements in the workplace has proved to work wonders. According to
TalentLMS' gamification survey on 400 U.S. employees, gamification in the
workspace makes employees feel more productive (87%), more engaged (84%),
and happier (82%) at work.

There are lots of ways in which you can leverage gamification in the workplace.
For example,

 You could use gamification in your Project Management platform to,

e.g., award points to employees for closing tasks quickly, or for meeting
deadlines.
 You could track customer care agents or sales agents, through a
gamified system (with badges, leaderboards, and so on).
  You could award developers points for squashing bugs and keep a tally
of their performance in your bug tracking system.
 You could also leverage your LMS' gamification features to
make employee training more engaging and perhaps even fun.
You'd be surprised how effective such schemes can be for motivating employees
in the workplace.

4. Train Your Employees

Not knowing how to perform their job well can have a significant impact on
employee motivation. Ditto for not being offered a clear career development
path. Employee training, can, fortunately, help with both of these. If you don't
already have an employee training program in place, then you should invest
immediately in creating one. With a modern online employee training platform,
like TalentLMS, you can build an effective staff training course, and deploy it
across your company's employees and departments within a day. Use your LMS
to offer new hires an onboarding course, teach your employees new skills, and
give senior workers the leadership skills that they need to advance their career.

5. Take Steps Towards A Better Working Environment

A great work environment will work wonders in raising your employees'

motivation levels and making them look forward to coming to work every day.
The biggest companies on the planet, including behemoths like Apple, Google,
and Facebook, understand this perfectly and have invested hundreds of millions,
and in some cases billions of dollars, into fancy offices.

Fortunately, you don't have to have millions lying around to make improvements
to your offices. If you understand what makes employees tick and how to
motivate your staff, you can achieve big results in workplace satisfaction with very
modest amounts of money. Installing a nice espresso machine in your office
kitchen, for example, is not going to break the bank—but your employees will
nonetheless appreciate the gesture.

Similar small-budgets ideas for motivating employees in the workplace would be

to:
  upgrade employee computers and monitors,
 offer perks like free sodas and sweets,
 install a table tennis table,
 invest in automating grunt work,
 let employees dress more casually.
If you have a larger budget, you could:

 invest in a more luxurious office,

 renovate your existing office,
 create a lounge area for your employees,
 have a real chef run the office cafeteria (like Google did),
 build an office gym.