How To Motivate Employees

We have talked about aligning one’s employees to goals and ensuring that all staffs play an active role in the business.

Aligning all employees to your goals fosters understanding and ensures that the least-ranking staff shares the general goal of the company and is willing to support it.

When this occurs, productivity is usually massive because the workers have found satisfaction and a driving passion for the job, making them put in 101% to ensure that the business goals are achieved.

No matter how your remuneration structure is compared to your competitors, having this deep connection with your employees will make them feel purposeful, and they will be motivated to do extraordinary things for your business.

Table of Contents

Important Tips on Organizational Alignment

Align Vision and Mission

We have already discussed a vision and mission statement: A broader view of your company’s Long-term Goals and Objectives.

Aligning employees to your mission and vision is essential; the most basic way to do that is to get them to remember easily.

Make your vision and mission statements concise; let them be easy to remember.

Use yourself as the beta-test, “how long did it take you to lay it into memory?” then judge the scenario or others and try to make the statement concise, short, and easy to understand.

Also, you could engrave them into the walls just after the entrance of the company’s building.

Let them be reminded when they resume work every morning; you could also frame it and place it in the lobby and work areas. Ensure that it gets registered in the subconscious of your employees.

Become A Facilitator

For success in an organizational setting, you must reach out to your staff one-on-one to help their weaknesses.

Be more than just an employer, be a life coach. Suppose your organization is too large for you to connect with each staff one-on-one.

In that case, you should assign team leaders, ensure that the weaknesses of your staff are catered for, and let them know why they have been selected for a particular duty and how that duty helps the company achieve its goals.

Let each staff know his importance to the mission and vision of the company.

Keep them motivated when they have been discouraged by tasks, deadlines, setbacks, and failures because these things are bound to happen. Issues from home may even affect productivity at work.

However, if you are their coach, you can know about this beforehand and remind them about their great importance to the company to enable them to keep pushing.

Encourage Your Employees

In addition to coaching, one way to align your employees to your goals is to keep them motivated.

As I have said earlier, ensuring that your staff shares your enthusiasm about your goals is very important. You must employ astute management techniques to ensure that you are keeping your employees motivated.

Do not be a selfish employer in your one-on-one discussions with your staff; ask questions, understand his needs, and try to take care of them before putting forward the business’s targets and the expected Key results.

If there are issues with your management style and dissatisfaction, address them quickly and solve the problem before it spreads like wildfire.

Ensure that you treat your employees in the best possible way, naturally giving them the drive to go the extra mile for you.

Don’t be rigid in your approach to motivation; there is no “one-size-fit” strategy for motivating your employees. They are different people; therefore, you need to approach them differently.

The human brain usually gets tired of routines. Quite unfortunately, most jobs have a specific pattern in which they employ.

So your employees may simply lack motivation because they are bored; they need a new challenge.

You may find yourself discussing the goals for the third quarter of the year, and you don’t get the energy you expect because they have gotten used to the roles, and it no longer excites them. So, how do you solve this dilemma?

You must nurture your employees to maintain the high level of momentum that they started with, with specific techniques to ensure that productivity remains at its peak and the drive to achieve these goals does not die.

Calls, Meetings, And Conferences

Ensure that you stay in touch with your employees and keep them motivated with meetings, calls, and conferences.

Let them know the effort the company is making to achieve those goals, the setbacks, the wins, and, more importantly, how important they are to the firm and how their efforts have led to huge wins.

This will imbibe some sense of responsibility in them, which they would like to maintain.

This is the biggest key to making an employee remain committed. Make them feel part of the business and not a dispensable employee, and they will be challenged to put their best every time.

Conduct Surveys

Draw up a list of survey questions, and use it to ensure that your employees understand the vision and mission of the company.

Ensure that each staff knows his role and his duty. If your staff is just performing tasks “as they come” without understanding their role, there will be no feeling of responsibility.

You must ensure that everyone understands their role, why they are appropriate for that role, and why that responsibility is crucial to the company’s vision.

In your surveys, leave room for feedback.

Ensure that you weigh in the opinions of everyone, and ensure that you allow them to know you did. Their lack of motivation may be a result of fear.

They feel like it’s too challenging and may be unable to pull it off.

Rigidity isn’t encouraged by business, so if you discover what can be changed to make the goal relatable to your staff, you should make that change.

Create Workshops and Skill Training

One method that works is to ensure that your staff does not remain at a level of learning.

Encourage development, both personally and professionally. The fact that they can learn new approaches and skills employed in their daily work may just be enough motivation to move on.

Encourage your employees to develop personally and professionally as part of your overall management strategy.

Learning removes your team from the boring daily routine, giving them something entirely different to do, and they may just rediscover their passion.

Failures in Employee Alignment And Motivation

The main cause of failures in employee alignment is poor communication. When the employee doesn’t get adequate information and engagement about a task, he’s on too.

Then there will be a disconnection from the company.

This mental disconnection will lead to a lack of motivation, as the worker is eager to close for the day and go home.

Rapidly looking forward to the end of the month to get his pay, caring less about whether or not the company has goals, talk more of accomplishing them.

It is important to keep a high level of communication among your employees, and in the 21^st century, there are many digital and social platforms for this.

You can reach your employees across the world, even if they work remotely.

Share all important information, including organizational updates, product updates, executive updates, training and workshops, educational tools, and marketing tools, and get their suggestions, inputs, and constructive criticism.

Ensure that your mode of communication can be accessed on mobile, and let everybody be accessible on the application “on-the-go” many people usually check out instant information from their phones to see emails, and the latest news, catch up with loved ones and see if there’s any information from work.

Ensure you can carry everybody along, let everybody actively contribute, and don’t let them miss out on crucial information.

This will lead to a strong bond and make it easy to align your employees to your goals. Ensure that communication never lags.

However, as much as you want to be very transparent with information, you must ensure that you share the information with the right team. It is quite unreasonable to share all information with everybody.

It will become a boring overload, and they may never pay any attention to the specific information.

Ensure that your staff is not oversaturated. Ensure that they can engage with it.

For example, there is some information that you will relay to the sales and marketing team that will get them very excited, but these goals may look so ordinary or even quite confusing to relate with for people in the design group.

Ensure that the information you share is standardized. Don’t overload staff with information that is of no importance to them.

You may even segment your staff’s digital communication platform based on their responsibility and roles and the information that will be meaningful to them and nothing else. Communication is only valued when it carries important information.

Remember that communication is a two-way thing. You want to talk to them, and they want to talk to you.

People get uninterested when they cannot participate in discussions. Endeavor not just to send updates.

Ask for their input suggestions, encourage them to react, and comment about them.

Let them ask questions and give observations, and It will even lead to discussions where you can just sit back and observe and write down important things.

Apart from your segmented platforms, you may create a general platform where all segmented goals are discussed to see how progress is being made toward the vision and mission of the company.

Achieving Your Personal Goals as an Entrepreneur

As a business owner, you have a target for starting a business, which must be achieved.

However, as I mentioned earlier, all your personal goals are hinged on self-development. I have read many books from best-sellers on their concepts of personal development and their various methodologies.

It would be best to acknowledge that there is no “one size fit all” approach.

There is no rigid path to fulfillment; if I was going into the US from China, and if you were going into the US from Germany, we would all arrive at the US successfully, flying through the air, but we will take different air routes, and we will get there at slightly different times.

Forget about the “instructions” you have received and the “killer tips” on becoming the best in the business. The truth is, only you can discover the most successful method.

We are all endowed with different natural skills and abilities, which we need to discover to achieve a purpose.

You may be endowed with organizational abilities, making you a natural leader.

Some people do not possess leadership abilities but are skilled in convincing people, making them very good negotiators and sales representatives.

As an entrepreneur, you must discover what you can do and build on those strengths, and you will still be a success at your job.

Steve Jobs was one of the most successful CEOs in the tech space in many Mega companies in the United States, including Apple, Pixar, Disney, NeXT, etc.

Despite being so successful as an entrepreneur in the tech space, he didn’t have programming skills.

It is said that “Jobs never wrote a line of code,” unlike Mark Zuckerberg, or Jack Dorsey, who are also successful in the tech space but are very good programmers and computer software pros.

Jobs was primarily a good entrepreneur with unrivaled marketing skills. The co-founder of Apple – Steve Wozniak, was the innovator, the engineer, and the inventor.

Jobs understood his strengths and utilized them properly to achieve his goals as an entrepreneur.

If you have chosen to open a business in a particular industry, I believe that it is because you have a ton of things to offer the industry, which will, in turn, fetch you money.

Therefore, it would be best to identify your strength and the value you offer, rather than following the crowd, because “that is how they do it”- If you join them, you cannot beat them.

Therefore, you must observe your outstanding attributes and make them the front of your entrepreneurial journey. Identify your strengths, make them a foundation for yourself, and build on them.

You may also pay some attention to your weaknesses and improve on them.

However, if you evaluate yourself and this weakness has no direct effect on your business, you may treat it like it doesn’t exist because your goals do not recognize that weakness.

Therefore, be sure that you work in capacities that will utilize your strengths, don’t pay attention to your weaknesses, and don’t assign yourself roles that will demand it.

Avoid them as much as possible. However, in situations where you cannot escape from those weaknesses, make a conscious effort to improve them.

If it’s a temporary situation, you may just cover up and rough your way through it; if it remains permanent, you should work to turn your weaknesses into strengths.

This is why you must focus appropriately on employing staff that solves a problem in your firm to give you fewer reasons to use your weaknesses.

You must walk on your clear, familiar path to reduce your chances of getting into these situations as much as possible.

You are an entrepreneur, not a machine; you cannot do everything on your own. Ensure that your employees can save you from getting into a fix.

Even as an entrepreneur, you cannot do everything on your own. That is why you need employees to help you in situations like these.

You may decide just to learn a particular skill that you find important for your job, but it will rip you of time you can use to do other productive things.

Even if you are a one-man business, you don’t need to do everything yourself.

Focus on the tasks that can bring out the best of your productivity, and outsource other tasks to contract staff.

You will save a lot of time, which can be invested in more important things than working on a task that isn’t your area of strength.

Time is infinite, but it is limited in supply. You only have 24 hours every day, and the average human being can only be productive for a maximum of 10 hours daily.

Therefore, to ensure that you reach your goals the way you desire, you must use your time judiciously.

Key Highlights

Importance of Organizational Alignment:
- Aligning employees with company goals fosters understanding and commitment.
- Productivity increases when employees share company goals and are motivated to support them.
- A deep connection with employees leads to purposefulness and extraordinary efforts for the business.
Tips for Organizational Alignment:
- Align Vision and Mission: Make vision and mission statements concise and easily memorable. Display them prominently within the workspace.
- Become A Facilitator: Reach out to employees, help them overcome weaknesses, and communicate their importance to the company’s goals.
- Encourage Your Employees: Motivate employees, address dissatisfaction, and personalize motivation strategies based on individual needs.
- Introduce Variety: Combat employee boredom by providing new challenges and learning opportunities.
- Calls, Meetings, And Conferences: Stay connected through meetings, calls, and conferences to share progress, wins, and setbacks.
- Conduct Surveys: Ensure employees understand their roles, responsibilities, and contribution to the company’s vision.
- Create Workshops and Skill Training: Encourage continuous development to keep employees engaged and passionate.
Failures in Employee Alignment And Motivation:
- Poor communication leads to mental disconnection, lack of motivation, and disinterest in company goals.
- High communication is facilitated through digital and social platforms.
- Ensure relevant information is shared, segmented, and targeted to specific teams.
Personal Goals for Entrepreneurs:
- Entrepreneurial success is tied to personal development and self-discovery.
- No one-size-fits-all approach to personal development; uniqueness matters.
- Leverage strengths, identify value, and build on them for entrepreneurial success.
- Focus on tasks that align with strengths and outsource tasks that aren’t.
Effective Time Management:
- Time is limited; judiciously manage it to reach desired goals.
- Prioritize tasks that align with strengths for maximum productivity.
- Consider outsourcing tasks that don’t align with strengths to save time.