Boosting Employee Motivation: 5 Foolproof Strategies for a Productive Workplace

May 18, 2023 | Employability, Communication

Employee motivation

Even though your customers are obviously a crucial component of your business, without your employees, it would be literally impossible to continue.

As clichéd as it sounds, a happy workforce makes for a happy and more productive workplace. With that being said, here are five foolproof ways to motivate your workforce.

Offer Lateral Growth Opportunities

In order to encourage and cultivate loyal and dedicated employees who not only complete their work on time and to the best of their ability, but also enjoy and thrive during the process.

Providing ways and means for career advancement is a necessity for all workers.

Lateral growth is a fantastic way of helping individual employees understand and experience different roles within the company on the same hierarchical level as their own.

Additionally, offering lateral movement, either on a temporary or permanent basis, will also give them a sense of career projection and allow you to keep your most skillful employees working for you and not a competitor.

Introduce Mentorship Options

Another great way to motivate your team members is by providing additional experience and ways to further their careers within your own company.

This can be done by introducing mentorship options for those who want them from the employee onboardingstage and beyond.

In the quest to improve workplace morale and employee loyalty, beyond mentorship and growth opportunities, practical tools like employee welcome boxes can instantly make new hires feel valued and part of the team.

Both returning employees or individuals branching into new roles within the company could immensely benefit from customized kits that demonstrate appreciation right from their first day.

Mentoring partnerships, either with employees working under the same department or elsewhere, across different sectors of your company, is fantastic for new and younger staff members, allowing them to learn from their more experienced colleagues.

Just a selection of the most impressive benefits of introducing mentorship options in the workplace for both mentors and mentees, as well as your company generally, include:

For Mentors:

  • An enhancement of self-worth and feeling as though they are making a difference
  • A growing sense of fulfillment
  • A greater level of responsibility at work
  • A way to improve active listening skills

For Mentees:

  • Development of new and existing skills
  • Expansion of their own network of contacts
  • Heightened levels of self-confidence
  • Constructive feedback in different areas
  • A way to help their communication skills

For the Company:

  • An improvement in rates of employee retention
  • A way to harness natural leadership skills
  • A more cohesive and productive working environment
  • A way to improve talent acquisition efforts
  • Ensuring your company is seen as being progressive within the industry

Measure Employee Engagement

Employee engagement runs simultaneously alongside employee motivation, and naturally, the more interested your staff members are in their professional roles, the more likely they are to exceed expectations.

A surprisingly inexpensive yet impressively effective way to motivate your workforce is to hold a range of lectures and seminars on a variety of different topics.

Moreover, it is entirely acceptable, even within the working day and on ‘work time’, to hold said seminars on subjects not directly related to professional roles, but instead be simply related to daily working life.

Launch an Employee Incentive Program

The effectiveness of motivating your employees by launching one or more engaging employee incentive programs can simply never be overstated.

Incentive programs, be that in the form of preloaded payment programs or other prizes, go a long way in improving employee motivation and morale.

Simply put, the more satisfied your team members are with their work and their workplace, the more likely they are to give everything they have to ensure each project is completed thoroughly.

Companies can use a real pay stub to gather and fill in such information, which will help organize incentives, bonuses, and other additional rewards.

Other key advantages to launching an employee incentive program include that your company’s levels of employee retention will heighten, team members will take fewer holiday and sick days overall, and they will also encourage teamwork.

Teamwork is the secret thread of success sewn into any business focused on longevity and boosting profit.

With the introduction of an exciting incentive program, your team members will be more likely to contribute to a collaborative company culture, rather than create a competitive one.

Hold Regular One-To-Ones

Even if you consider yourself to be an honest and open manager who actively tries to involve your employees in company decisions and encourages your team members to confide in you, it still might now be enough to ensure employee satisfaction.

Taking a more personal and, perhaps, less informal, conversational approach when talking to your employees about their levels of job satisfaction will only serve to exemplify how motivated they feel and, subsequently, how productive they will be.

A few tips to help improve your one-to-one meetings to better benefit you and your staff members include:

  • Prepare an agenda ahead of time
  • Take notes throughout the session and send a follow-up email afterward
  • Set goals for each employee
  • Begin with workplace topics to break the ice
  • Be as flexible as to the structure of the meeting