Are you a smart manager? Do you know how to motivate your employees?

The objectives of an organization can be achieved only through the efforts of people. And people need to be motivated in an understanding way to put in their best. However, what motivates one person might not motivate another, and therefore for the best results any manager should be understanding and, as far as feasible, get to know something about each of his/her subordinates.

Any manager must endeavour to get the best from each individual member of his/her team or work group, and that might require motivating different members in different ways, while still motivating the team or group as a whole. It requires the building of a good “work environment” based on the spirit of trust and cooperation between management and other personnel. The HR manager – along with other managers – has an important role to play in developing and maintaining a good work environment. Here are some strategies managers can put into action to truly motivate their employees.

Motivation strategies

To a large extent, a high level of employee motivation is derived from effective management practices. To develop motivated employees, HR manager should ensure that HR personnel as well as other departmental managers must do the following:

Empowering employees

Empowerment occurs when individuals in an organization are given autonomy, authority, trust, and encouragement to accomplish a task. Empowerment is designed to unshackle the worker and to make a job the worker’s responsibility.

Providing an effective reward system

To motivate behaviour, the organization needs to provide an effective reward system. Rewards demonstrate to employees that their behaviour is appropriate and should be repeated. If employees don’t feel that their work is valued, their motivation will decline. Common examples are pay bonuses, promotions, time off, special assignments, office fixtures, awards, verbal praise etc.

Redesigning jobs

Many people go to work and go through the same, unenthusiastic actions to perform their jobs. These individuals often refer to this condition as burnout. But smart managers can do something to improve this condition before an employee gets bored and loses motivation. Redesign attempts may include the following:

• Job enlargement: It increases the variety of tasks a job includes. It may reduce some of the monotony, and as an employee’s boredom decreases, his/her work performance generally increases.

• Job rotation: This practice assigns different jobs or tasks to different people on a temporary basis. The idea is to add variety and to expose people to the dependence that one job has on other jobs. Job rotation can encourage higher levels of contributions and renew interest and enthusiasm. The organization benefits from a cross-trained workforce.

• Job enrichment: This application includes not only an increased variety of tasks, but also provides an employee with more responsibility and authority. If the skills required to do the job are skills that match the jobholder’s abilities, job enrichment may improve morale and performance.

• Creating flexibility: Today’s employees value personal time. Because of family needs, a traditional 9 to 5 working may not work for many people. Therefore, for some categories of employees, ‘flexi time’ – which permits employees to set and control their own work hours – is one way that organizations are accommodating their employees’ needs, e.g. marketing personnel.

There are many tips on how to motivate your employees. If you would like to learn more, why not download the free eBook “Human Resource Management”?!

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