Motivating Your Employees To Be More Productive Workers
Being the owner and manager of a small business is a tremendous undertaking. It involves balancing a budget and leading a marketing campaign, raising capital and designing new products. Unlike at major corporations, where a different person is assignment to different specialties, a small business manager usually needs to be a developer, advertiser, fund-raiser, consultant, and hiring manager all at once.
At the same time, a manager also needs to be an effective leader for the employees that he hires. Considering the relative importance of each hire and the many aforementioned tasks that likely fall on the manager’s plate, identifying a successful motivation approach is even more important for small businesses than it is for large ones. When done correctly, a manager can boost productivity by making his employees care more about the company and about their work. Conversely, when left overlooked or underemphasized, a poor motivation strategy can translate into unhappy workers and pronounced business inefficiencies.
Of course, some managers can be effective motivators simply by virtue of their personalities. In the way they carry themselves and communicate with employees, these managers can attain an immediate cult of respect and a shared sense of vision – traits both of which can spur employees to do better work. Such charisma among managers is hard to teach, but those lacking in this regard should still consider pursuing management and leadership courses. Successful courses can have a marked impact on the way a manager runs his small business.
But for those small business owners or managers who have no strong abilities or severe deficiencies as far as charisma is concerned, what concerted steps can be taken to boost employee motivation? Here are a few suggestions:
Cultivate culture
A strong workplace culture breeds an attitude where employees work for a cause greater than themselves. This culture can be instilled by keeping workers appraised of the big picture, by providing appealing benefits, and by encouraging office socialization outside of normal work hours.
Offer positive incentives
Generally speaking, there are two main ways to incentivize people: by being positive (and by encouraging employees to work towards a goal) or by being negative (and either explicitly or implicitly make employees fearful about their performance). Most managers use some combination of these two methods, an approach that ultimately causes the positives and the negatives to cancel each other out in the worker’s mind. It is therefore important that only one method – ideally a positive one – is pursued.
Encourage team work
Studies have shown that people work better when they work together, largely because they feel their task less tedious and don’t want to let down their co-workers. When possible, then, teamwork is great to promote as a subtle means of boosting motivation.
Search out good hiring fits
No matter how hard one tries, a manager may never succeed in motivating certain employees. On the other hand, some workers may be so self-motivating that they don’t need any prodding from above. This all goes to show that motivation is strongly tied to personality. If a small business seeks the most motivated workforce possible, it should look for the trait during the hiring process.
These are just a few concerted steps that managers can take when trying to motivate their employees. While motivation is an intrinsic value that usually cannot be forced, managers that find ways to cultivate and encourage it stand to help their small business benefit tremendously as a result.
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When in Doubt, Just Do!
In this video Robert Greenberg, CEO of Skechers, puts the absolute bottom line on being successful in business. What’s nice is he does it in a little over 1 minute. This key to success is so important in my opinion if you were to know everything else about business but this, you will most likely fail. Conversely, if this were the only thing you knew about business, I’d give you better than 50/50 odds for success.
So what is it, what’s the key?
Persistence
Just don’t ever stop trying! Hopefully you don’t feel let down that this piece of advice is so basic, but it is everything you need to know to be successful. I can hear some of you saying “Well, you’ve got to know about sourcing product, or cash flow, or at the very least a little about financing”. Nope, you don’t need to know anything about all of that going in. The only thing you need to know is, without fail, you will not give up. You’ll learn the rest along the way, it will be hard at times, but as long as you promise yourself persistence the rest will fall into place.
KeyTakeaways
- When you have to come up with an idea, you will.
- Just keep doing something. So many people plan a business and they decide they just can’t get past a certain roadblock, so they drop the whole idea completely. It will be very difficult for those people to ever find success.
- Eventually preparation leads to opportunity.
- When in doubt, just do…
- Struggle is what you learn from. Approach struggles and roadblocks as learning opportunities, you actually NEED to struggle a little bit in order to take yourself to the next level in business.
A Thought on Failure
Some people are so afraid of failing, it keeps them from ever trying, yet any successful business person will tell you about the many times they failed. Why do you think you will be the one successful person who has never fallen flat on their face at least a couple times? In fact, look at failure as the prerequisite to getting into class with the big boys (or girls). Once you fail at business you then have something in common with some of the greatest business people ever. Did you know that Thomas Edison invented concrete furniture? Big dressers and stands made entirely out of concrete. Look around your house right now…how much concrete furniture do you have? That idea was an absolute, utter, and complete failure, yet Edison keep working and trying ideas and we all know how that worked out.
If someone as brilliant as Edison can fail and still be successful, why do we think we should never be exposed to the same failure in our business. Wear failure as a badge of honor, learn from it, and for heaven’s sake don’t use it as an excuse to stop trying.
