Employee Motivation Tips:

Unless you are in a highly mechanized industry, staff are the lifeblood of your business, the face of your brand, the ambassadors of your product / service, the reflection of your company culture, the key links in your company vision and the facilitators of the company Goals… Well, at least they should be, but we know that there are many challenges when working with human beings… after all they have a mind of their own…. and machines do not.

Even IF you are highly mechanized, you will rely on humans for key roles for facilitation and operational / technical management, and they are that critical fleshy link between the cold machines and business success. Maybe one day when the machines can create and manage other machines, we won’t need to have this topic on the blog, but when that day comes we will all have bigger problems to deal with I am sure. Until then lets look at some Employee Motivation Tips.

As we mentioned in a previous post, below is the key to performance and ultimately success:

Motivation + Skill Set = Performance

What motivates (or demotivates) people has been an ever-expanding debate for millennia – and we know that it varies depending on many factors such as age, culture, wealth or lack thereof, Maslow’s Heirachy of Needs, complex personal desires and goals, demographics, daily positive and negative physiological messages, lack of sun, lack of darkness, too much heat, too little heat, not enough sunscreen, uniform not a good fit, not enough chairs, dry skin etc… I have heard too many to mention – and there are many challenges within those areas that can take a lifetime to unfold and unpack and its tough to define what is a valid motivator and what people will use as an excuse for their poor performance. 

The human brain is complex and so are the emotions associated with motivation – If you are looking for employee motivation tips, we have found that there are a few basic changes one can make within a business / workforce / team environment that can bring critical change and help to break through the nonsense and get to the key issues. One of our companies grew from just 8 staff to well over 100 in just a few years, spread across a vast country, and we grew organically making plans on the fly, without developing key structures for the staff to operate within, and as a result we had a major ongoing battle with staff motivation which we needed to resolve. On the other hand, one of our other businesses has just 4 staff, and staff motivation within that intimate environment can cause major headaches that can scupper the entire company’s motivation to succeed – so this a problem not unique to larger staff bases, it can be even more dangerous within small businesses… both can be fixed however.

Back to Basics….this is the key and is probably the most valuable of all employee motivation tips a business can consider. By basics, I refer to going back to the beginning, in fact before the beginning, before that staff member was even part of your company. It is not rocket science, we will be expanding on each of these points below in the coming posts.

I will be providing 15 tips on how to motivate staff, that takes into account not just the reversal of a demotivated staff base but how to avoid it from becoming an issue at all. Click here for tips 1 – 7