5 Tips to Help Managers Improve Employee Motivation

The key to effectively running a profitable business is motivating employees to perform their roles at a high level. For your employees to perform at their best, they must be intrinsically motivated. Intrinsic motivation comes from understanding who they are, who they want to be, and how their current role can help them close the gap. Finding intrinsic motivation is a deeply personal process. Still, it can be assisted by taking the time to understand your employees' goals and help them see how their goals can be accomplished within your organization. By helping employees identify how their work connects to your company vision, you can create higher levels of commitment and personal accountability.

Higher levels of commitment and accountability will lead to employees working harder to accomplish company objectives because they understand how their success is linked to yours. Former MLB Coach Yoga Berra once said, "If you know where you're going, it's a lot easier to get there." This is as true in business as it is in baseball. When you help your employees develop a clear vision of where your company is going and the benefit they will receive from excelling at their role, you create an environment where employees want to thrive because they know they will win, as the company wins.

Be Clear on the Company's Mission and Vision.

The first step is ensuring employees understand your business's vision and mission. This understanding needs to be clear, aspirational, and values-based. You might feel that vision and mission statements as empty words that do not provide much value to the day-to-day operations of a business. This could not be further from the truth. Vision Statements offer employees a picture of what a company wants to be. At the same time, a mission statement details why the work that is being done is essential. When you provide your employees with the what and the why of the company's existence, they can better find purpose in their work within the company.

Employees' commitment and motivation are highest when their passion and purpose align with the company's needs. By consistently communicating the company's vision and mission statement, you can help employees understand how central both are to everything the company does. This lays the foundation for the employee to connect the dots between their role and the company's overall success.

Gain Commitment.

Once you have helped employees understand the company's vision and mission, your next job is to gain employees' commitment to their role within the organization. Gaining employees' commitment transfers the burden of accountability from you to the employee. When employees are committed to doing a job, they are more likely to show initiative, seek help, and require less follow-up from you. Gaining commitment is essential because commitment is the foundation for accountability. Accountability is an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions. If you establish a safe and candid work environment with your employees, they will only commit to things they believe they can accomplish. By soliciting commitments from your employees, you gain awareness of the employee's belief in their ability to complete a task and their word to put their best effort into achieving it.

Secure Resources.

After gaining commitment, you should seek to understand what resources employees need to complete the task. If the employees are going to complete the task for the first time, the help they need might be coaching or training. You should work with the employees to identify the resources required to complete the job. Aligning the amount of time, money, materials, technology, people, or other resources upfront can prevent future frustration, conflict, and delays. By identifying and securing the resources necessary to complete the task upfront, you can better position the employee for success.

Monitor Performance.

You and your employees must establish a routine for discussing employee satisfaction and performance. By defining periodic moments to pause and review actions and results, both parties have certainty that they will be able to discuss

• How is the employee performing compared to expectations?

• How does the employee's current work align with their personal goals?

• What additional training or support does the employee need?

• If any changes need to be made to current roles or responsibilities?

• Ways to improve communication, partnership, and collaboration between employees and other stakeholders associated with the company.

During these meetings, you and the employee should review previous commitments to ensure that both parties follow through on the previously communicated actions. If either party fails to meet prior commitments, a resolution should be found to adjust expectations or provide additional resources or support.

2-Way Feedback.

During the progress check-ins, you and the employee should have the opportunity to provide each other with feedback. Check-in meetings should be more than you communicating expectations and providing feedback. Employees should have time to voice concerns or give feedback on work conditions, goals, organizational culture, and management practices. Encouraging employees to be candid about their wants and needs can help to strengthen relationships and remove leadership blind spots. By providing a space for employees to voice their thoughts and concerns, you can better understand what might be getting in the way of their productivity. With this information, you can better support employees in finding solutions that help them and the company perform at higher levels.

Summary

Employees join companies to satisfy their wants and needs. You can help employees identify how their wants and needs can be fulfilled through work. This will create higher levels of loyalty and commitment. Committed employees will do everything within their power to support the success of an organization. To improve your employees' productivity and effectiveness, start by understanding why they're working for you. Then, help them see how their commitment to bringing the company's vision and mission to life will bring them closer to achieving their goals.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with Your Path Coaching and Consulting. He is a former retail executive with over 20 years of experience in the retail industry. He is a Co-Active coach who focuses on helping professionals and small business owners overcome insecurities, knowledge gaps, and lack of direction. He does this by helping clients tap into their values, recognize their strengths, and develop actionable strategies for growth.

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Improve Your Team Culture with this 15-minute routine.

Improving team culture is a challenge that is universal to all leaders. At their roots, teams work best with a shared purpose, good communication, and collaboration. Like a rowing team, everyone must have a cadence for working together and rowing in the same direction. One of the primary roles of a leader is to bring talented people together, create an operational cadence, provide guidance, and help them to achieve more together than they could apart. Adding Recognition, Obstacle, and Win (ROW) to meetings can help leaders achieve these goals. ROW segments in meetings improve communication, encourage recognition, and bring visibility to obstacles in a time-efficient and effective way.

ROW meetings are about developing a cadence for communicating the good and bad things happening in a business. These meeting segments are typically 15 to 20 minutes long. Each participant comes to the meeting prepared with a 2-minute recap of their week. The summary should include recognizing one person for doing a great job, identifying one obstacle they needed help with, and stating one team win they wanted to celebrate. Since each participant only has 2 minutes, it forces them to be brief and only focus on the highlights. These recaps should mirror the trailer for a movie. The goal is to provide enough information for people to know what is happening, but not so much that people lose interest. If anyone attending the meeting is interested in learning more, they can follow up after the meeting with questions or suggestions.

Employee Recognition

One of the hallmarks of a good culture is recognition. Adam Grant and Francesca Gino's research has shown that expressions of gratitude can help build employees' self-efficacy and social worth, motivating them to engage in prosocial behavior. Thanking employees for a job well done is one of the best ways to improve a team's culture. Employees go to work every day, doing their job, and many never hear a thank you from their peers or boss. Organizational culture improves when leaders maintain a process for slowing down, considering the contributions made by those around them, and expressing gratitude.

A supplemental benefit of this routine is how it helps people get to know each other. During group meetings, there is a tendency for some extroverts to dominate conversations and for everyone else to listen. The communication imbalance can create group thinking and blind spots within a team. The two-minute communication requirement for each participant ensures that everyone has an equal opportunity to communicate. More value is generated during the meeting because there is a greater diversity of thought and inclusion of everyone's ideas.

Sharing of Obstacles

Each participant will share one obstacle they needed help solving. Initially, leaders might be uncomfortable voicing obstacles because of a fear of looking weak or unqualified. It is common for employees to be private about the barriers preventing their success until they have done everything possible to solve the issue independently. The hesitation to share challenges creates unneeded pressure within organizations and can slow down the removal of obstacles. By individuals being vulnerable in the group setting, other participants who have prior experience with similar obstacles can assist the person in need. In addition, when there is a commonality in challenges, participants can partner together to find solutions.

Obstacles are like weeds that prevent organizations from reaching their full potential. Employees within organizations do their best to pull weeds. Often, the process is long and complex because employees need more tools, resources, and power to address complex issues. Managers are essential in getting employees the tools they need to overcome barriers. The ROW meeting segments provided a cadence for managers to check in with employees and surface problems they may need assistance with. As they inquire about challenges, they can provide tips and guidance for addressing opportunities. If they cannot solve the problem at their level, the manager can bring it to the meeting and seek advice and support from the team.

Celebrating Wins

The final segment of the recap is a review of wins for the week. Celebrating successes is essential for locking in learning. In Whitney Johnson's book Smart Growth, she evangelizes the role of celebrations in cementing learning and strengthening relationships. Leaders work hard to drive results. Time must be allocated for them to feel the joy of their team's accomplishment. Sharing of wins provides examples of excellence for the broader group. It also creates opportunities for individuals to be more aware of success outside their direct business, which can both motivate and inspire others to greatness.

Talking about team wins during group meetings helps the team focus on the big picture. Most organizations operate in silos. For information to be shared, it has to flow up one silo to the leader and then back down another silo. The multiple communication points can be slow and weaken the benefit of the message. Often this results in team members focusing too much on their silo and not dedicating time or energy to thinking cross-functionally. Great leaders encourage 360-degree communication because they know removing bottlenecks accelerates organizational performance.

Monitoring Team Fitness

Weekly meetings can be an excellent way for a leader to monitor a team's fitness. Meetings will be super positive, high energy, and upbeat when things are going well. The meeting will feel completely different when obstacles grow or stress rises. There will be more negativity. People will struggle more with finding and discussing wins, and the group will spend more time discussing obstacles. When this occurs, it is a sign of illness within your team. Just as you try to diagnose a problem when you are not feeling well and take steps to heal, when your team is not fit, you must take action to improve team dynamics. Implementing ROW meeting segments and paying attention to how your employees communicate during meetings will help you catch potential illness before it spreads and begins negatively impacting team culture.

Putting it into Action

The ROW meeting approach can effectively establish a culture of recognition, positivity, and accountability within the team. In addition, it will ensure that every team member speaks during each meeting. It encouraged them to spend 66% of their time talking about positive events in the last week and only 33% of the time on obstacles. It challenges them to prioritize, summarize, and communicate directly. Speakers must practice bottom-lining and creating space for others during meetings.

Adding ROW segments to meetings improves engagement because multiple voices will be heard, and the conversation will focus on the remarkable things happening in the business. Team members will find it refreshing to get obstacles brought to the table, and the group will feel a greater sense of cohesion as they discuss ways to solve problems after the calls. Implementing this 15-minute-a-week routine can do a lot to improve the culture of an organization. The practices leaders establish say a lot about who they are and what is essential. Leaders who build routines around recognizing team members, capturing obstacles, and celebrating wins build a strong foundation of trust within their organization. Trust is needed to create a strong team culture.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with Your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching services for managers, executives, and small business owners.

For tips on leadership and professional development, follow me:

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

Interested in working with an executive coach?

4 Ways to Keep Your Employees Engaged?

A recent gallop study shows that only 32% of U.S. employees are engaged with their employers. It is important to pause for a moment and consider what this truly means for organizations. When employees are not engaged, employees are not delivering their best work. Imagine how bad a baseball team would be if 6 out of 9 players on the field were not engaged. The team would have so many weaknesses that it would be hard for them to compete. In an environment where the norm is for employees not to be engaged, organizations that can drive high levels of employee engagement position themselves to have a competitive advantage. Solving your employee engagement issues requires understanding why employees are not engaged. Gaining this information is best done by having one on one conversations, but some of the most common reasons are

• poor clarity of expectations

• lack of connection between the company's mission and daily activities

• limited opportunities for learning and growth

• poor job fit

• employees not feeling cared for at work

All is not lost. In the next 30 days, you can implement steps to improve employee engagement within your organization. Those steps will require you to dedicate one-on-one time with employees, but that time can reengage employees currently going through the motions at work and only delivering a portion of what they are capable of.

Provide Opportunities for Professional Development:

One of the common complaints voiced by employees is that they are interested in advancing their careers, but they are unsure how. Managers of employees should talk with employees about career goals and help map out action plans to help employees develop the skills and competency necessary to advance their careers. Employees often struggle to identify which external training, education, books, podcasts, networking, and volunteer activity they should participate in to grow professionally. Holding meetings regularly where positive and developmental feedback is given is a great way to help employees develop professionally. Managers should assist employees in setting SMART goals around the skills they need to improve to excel in their current role and prepare themselves for advancement opportunities. This, along with connecting employees with mentors, is an effective way to help employees advance their careers.

Encourage Open Communication:

Employees who joined your organization because they believed you would be a good person to work for. Over time, how you interact with them will influence if they maintain that belief. When you invest time in developing a relationship with your employees, you increase the chances of them providing you with honest feedback. With this feedback, you can take actions to address their concerns. Sometimes resolutions can be found by giving a different perspective to the employees. Other times, employees will provide you with information that will result in you making changes. Occasionally a resolution will not be found, but you will have the benefit of awareness, and employees will know that their concerns were heard. As the boss, it is up to you to decide what you do with feedback, but it is critical that your employees feel comfortable communicating with you. Often employees leave jobs over problems that could be solved with open communication. As the leader, it is your responsibility to create open lines of communication.

Provide Incentives and Recognition:

Providing incentives is an excellent way to help to clarify expectations for employees. When you take the time to develop incentives that reward employee behavior, you can motivate employees to execute organizational values and strategy at a higher level. When incentives are linked to specific performance metrics, employees can work towards achieving those metrics. When incentives are around specific behaviors, employees can learn the desired values and actions and strive to bring them to life. Small steps like changes in titles, bonuses, and wage promotions can significantly boost employee self-worth, self-esteem, and happiness within an organization. As a manager, you should seek opportunities to recognize and reward employees for their good work. Your actions will create a culture of positivity that will aid in employee engagement.

Make Fairness a Priority:

As you make decisions in your company around compensation, benefits, employee development, assignments, and promotion, ensure that you do so fairly. Often time managers make decisions quickly without taking the time to consider how their actions will be perceived or the unintended consequence they could generate. Unfair treatment can create friction within an organization that demotivates employees. Particular attention should be spent considering how policies and procedures potentially disadvantage minorities and individuals of low status. Structural discrimination exists, and decisions influenced by unconscious biases frequently demotivate and alienate employees from under-represented groups.

Summary

As a manager, you can create a supportive environment that encourages employee engagement. How you engage with employees directly impacts their motivation and commitment. Improving employee engagement takes time and intentionality. It requires you to be purposeful about organizational culture, to listen, to use good judgment, and adjust how things are done to meet the changing needs of your employees. The pandemic shifted employee expectations, and there is no going backward. This, along with the natural transition of baby boomers retiring and generation z employees entering the workforce, is causing a shift in what employees want. They expect companies to be better stewards of their time and careers. The bottom line is that employees want to work for managers that care about them and their future. This can be done if you are willing to listen to your employees and provide them with the level of support they desire.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching services for managers, executives, and small business owners.

For tips on leadership and professional development, follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

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