As a business owner, it’s important for you to have motivated employees. You feel great when you go to work and you sense an air of enthusiasm around you. It feels good when employees come up with new ideas, are proactive and take the initiative to improve things.
But often, this is not the case. Instead, you may sense a more dull, unenthusiastic atmosphere at work. And you might feel like you have to push your employees to get work done. Or the problem might be limited to one or two employees.
Don’t Focus on Monetary Incentives
No matter what the problem might be, it doesn’t hurt to sit down and think about how you can make things better. According to Daniel Pink, the author of Drive, a lot of people focus on monetary incentives to increase motivation, but this is a mistake.
Studies show that when you give people a financial incentive, they do, at first, work with greater enthusiasm. After all, everyone wants more money. But very quickly, this enthusiasm drops off and they start performing less efficiently than before.
Instead, it’s when people work without the incentive of money that they come up with their best ideas. This happens when they find the work genuinely interesting, and they’re doing it because they’re enjoying it.
Monetary Incentives + Good Working Conditions
Monetary incentives are not everything. But this doesn’t mean that you should stop paying your employees well. It’s still important to make your employees feel valued, and you can do this by giving them as much as other people in your line of business, maybe even a little more.
But if you want someone to start performing better, don’t just give them a raise. Think about how you can make the job more interesting.
Is that person simply not suited for that line of work? In that case, there’s not much you can do. But if the person has a talent for what they’re doing, then you can try to make the working conditions better for them.
Changes to Motivate Your Employees
You could give an employee a dedicated space for their work, like their own office. Or you could give them a better computer. Some people actually work better when surrounded by others. So you could come up with an open plan for your office.
The problem could also be mental rather than physical. Some people may not work well when given more than one task at a time. So give them one thing to do at a time, and when that’s done, you can give them another. Or some people may feel like their ideas have been shot down a lot at previous jobs, in which case they might just need more encouragement to keep going.
