Employees
10 Ways To Stimulate Employee Motivation
15 Steps On How To Welcome Your New Employees
10 Ways To Stimulate Employee Motivation
Today’s fast-moving business environment demands that the effective manager be both a well-organised administrator and highly adept in understanding people’s basic needs and behaviour in the workplace. Gaining commitment, nurturing talent, ensuring employee motivation and productivity requires open communication and trust between managers and staff.
1. Understand Their Behaviour: People at work naturally tend to adopt instinctive modes of behaviour that are self-protective, rather than open and collaborative. This explains why emotion is a strong force in the workplace and why management often reacts violently to criticisms and usually seeks to control, rather than take risks. So, in order to eliminate this kind of perspective and to increase employee motivation, it is best that you influence behaviour, rather than to change personalities. Insisting what you expect from your employees will only make the situation worse.
2. Be Sure That People’s Lowe-Level Needs Are Met: People have various kinds of needs. Examples of lower-level needs are salary, job security and working conditions. In order to increase employee motivation, you have to meet these basic needs. Consequently, failure to meet with basic needs, nearly always results in dissatisfaction among staff. Satisfaction, on the other hand, springs from meeting higher-level needs such as responsibility, progress and personal growth. When satisfaction is met, chances are, employee motivation is at hand.
3. Encourage Pride: People need to feel that their contribution is valued and unique. If you are a manager, seek to exploit this pride in others and be proud of your own ability to handle staff with positive results. This, in turn, will encourage employee motivation among your people.
4. Listen Carefully: In many areas of a manager’s job, from meetings and appraisals to telephone calls, listening plays a key role. Listening encourages employee motivation and therefore, benefits both you and your staff. So make an effort to understand people’s attitudes by careful listening, questioning and by giving them the opportunity to express themselves.
5. Build Confidence: Most people suffer from insecurity at some time. The many kinds of anxiety that affect people in organisations can feed such insecurity and insecurity impedes employee motivation. Your antidote, therefore, is to build confidence by giving recognition, high-level tasks and full information. In doing so, you not only refurbish employee motivation but boost productivity as well.
6. Encourage Contact: Many managers like to hide away behind closed office doors, keeping contact to a minimum. That makes it easy for an administrator but hard to be a leader. It is far better to keep your office door open and to encourage people to visit you when the door is open. Go out of your way to chat to staff on an informal basis. Keep in mind that building rapport with your staff will effectively increase employee motivation.
7. Use The Strategic Thinking Of All Employees: It is very important to inform people about strategic plans and their own part in achieving these strategies. Take trouble to improve their understanding and to win their approval, as this will have a highly positive influence on performance and increasing employee motivation as well.
8. Develop Trust: The quality and style of leadership are major factors in gaining employee motivation and trust. Clear decision making should be coupled with a collaborative, collegiate approach. This entails taking people into your confidence and explicitly and openly valuing their contributions. By simply giving your staff the opportunity to show that you can trust them, is enough to increase employee motivation among them.
9. Delegate Decisions: Pushing the power of decision-making downwards, reduces pressure on senior management. It motivates people on the lower levels because it gives them a vote of confidence. Also because the decision is taken nearer to the point of action, it is more likely to be correct. Consequently, by encouraging them to choose their own working methods, make decisions and giving them responsibility for meeting the agreed goal, will encourage employee motivation among your staff.
10. Appraising To Motivate: When choosing methods of assessing your staff’s performance, always make sure that the end result has a positive effect on employee motivation and increases people’s sense of self-worth. Realistic targets, positive feedback and listening, are key factors. If you follow these simple steps in increasing employee motivation, rest assured you will have a good working relationship with your staff and at the same time boost your company’s productivity. Just bear in mind that people are employed to get good results for the company. Their rates of success are intrinsically linked to how they are directed, reviewed, rewarded, trusted and motivated by the management.
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15 Steps On How To Welcome Your New Employees
Looking after a new employee during their first few weeks at work, can mean the difference between their success and failure as employees, as well as your success and failure as an employer, manager or supervisor. Proper orientation, determines how fast the new employee can be productive and efficient in his or her new job, while giving you a good opportunity to make your new employee an efficient part of your team.
Below are 15 suggestions that will help you deal with your new employees during their first few weeks and help make sure they get started on the right track.
1. Have a induction policy for welcoming and training new employees, don't just leave it to whoever is available. Human resources should cover the HR side of the induction with a trainer (if you have one) or a senior manager or supervisor covering the more hands on part of the job. Either way, the following is a minimum of what is required.
2. Give your employee a warm welcome. Don't just point them to the area where they will work and then let them get on with it. Nothing makes a new employee feel comfortable more than a warm welcome. It costs nothing to do and will pay dividends in future production.
3. Give them a brief description about your role as a supervisor. Knowing who's in charge and what you expect from them, will make them more comfortable with you as the boss.
4. Give your new employee a welcome tour of the whole department or, if the site isn't too big, the whole site. Make sure they know how to get to the bathroom, emergency exits, cafeteria, etc.
5. Give them a brief summary about the company, its history, as well as its mission and objectives.
6. If possible, demonstrate your company’s products and/or services, paying particular attention to the products relating to the area in which the employee will work. This will make them more secure and confident with the work that they are going to be doing.
7. Explain to your new employee how the company works, particularly if the company has any unusual working practices or a different structure than the norm. Again, this will help familiarise them with the company.
8. Tell your new employee about the company’s competitors and what is being done to make sure that the company is staying ahead of the competition.
9. Explain in detail your new employee’s responsibilities and describe their job functions. Don't leave it to the other employees to teach them the basics, unless there is a trained member of staff whose job it is.
10. Let your new employee be aware of what you and the company expect from them. This includes proper work ethics, productivity, teamwork and appearance.
11. Explain the specific conditions and requirements of employment, including hours, pay, pay periods, holiday pay, sickness provisions, pension, medical benefits, lateness etc.
12. Be very clear about the safety rules, policies, procedures and regulations. Explain and show proper use of safety devices.
13. Introduce your new employee to his or her co-workers, along with a brief description of their jobs and responsibilities.
14. Outline opportunities for promotions and other opportunities.
15. To give them time to acclimatise, give them a work buddy, a friendly experienced worker, to show them the job and work with them for the first week of two.
Covering all of these basics will help new employees settle in and they will be more efficient and will be able to contribute much more quickly, compared to employees that are just left to their own devices.