Business Bites: Motivating your team

Be a leader people wish to work for

In this month’s Business Bites, we explore how to create a motivating work environment as a leader.

Some of the benefits of having highly motivated employees include:

• Increased employee satisfaction
• Improved employee loyalty
• Increased employee retention
• Reduced employee turnover and absenteeism
• Improved productivity

The article by Joe Mull, ‘What it takes to create an engaging work environment’ published by the Harvard Business Review (HBR), gives us the following insights into motivation: “An analysis of more than 200 studies and articles on employee engagement and turnover shows that employees tend to feel emotionally and psychologically committed when they achieve three conditions:

• Ideal job: The concept of an “ideal job” is not about making everything perfect for an employee. It’s a belief, on the part of the employee, that their job fits into their life in an ideal way.
• Meaningful work: Among the many dimensions of meaningful work, three factors stand out: purpose, strengths, and belonging. Workers need to believe that their employer stands for something; aligning a person’s strengths to their role improves performance; and belonging is consistently cited as a top driver of employee retention
• Great boss: The list of qualities for ‘great bosses’ is long, but the most important competencies can be narrowed down into key areas”

We will probe these areas a little more in this article.

Whether you are a new or experienced leader, without doubt one of your goals is to create and support a motivational work environment. You want to be a leader who people want to work for. But how is this done and what are the ingredients?

Firstly, it should be made clear that leaders and managers don’t ‘motivate’ individuals, motivation is something that teams experience under the right conditions, many of which you can create.

Ideal job

An individual’s perception of the ideal job will be driven by wages, workloads, and flexibility.

Wages/salary should be seen to be fair and equitable for the duties performed. It can be difficult to assess this, especially if you are only looking within your own business. Salary benchmarking is a process whereby you can compare salary and benefits of your employees with others within your business but more importantly with similar roles in competitors.

Salary and compensation benchmarking surveys gather information on the average pay and benefits for various organisations. After that, it compares the pay package on offer against those offered for the same role by your rivals. Whilst you can find online tools, you should look to engage expert salary benchmarking professionals. Another important part of compensation will be in helping individuals to develop through training, which you can identify as part of their one-to-ones. By establishing their goals, you can create a personal development plan for employees.

In terms of workload, it is important that individuals are not overloaded especially if you are asking them to take on extra/new responsibilities. When you need to assign new tasks, projects, or duties to team members you should explore what can be reduced or removed from their workload.

Flexibility isn’t necessarily about where and when someone will work. You can be clear about your expectations, including important deadlines and performance metrics you’d like your employees to hit, but at the same time allow them to establish how they will achieve those goals. As part of good delegation, you should be available to them when needed especially when they need extra support.

Meaningful work

In essence, this is driven by employees who see their employer is interested in more than just profits, who see that their strengths are aligned with their role, and that they have a sense of belonging and are accepted and celebrated for their achievements.

Are your team members aware of how their tasks and assignments contribute to the larger goals of the business? You can use one-to-ones and team meetings to illustrate this. Highlight and celebrate ways in which work is making a positive impact on your business goals. Employee recognition in this way will lead to individuals feeling valued.

Great boss

A key area for you to be seen as a great boss is trust.

Building trust with your team can involve many facets, but the following give an idea of the basics:

Be reliable:
• Teams will lose faith in a leader if the leader can’t be relied upon to do what they say they will do
• Employees don’t expect leaders to know everything, but they do need to hold a level of confidence in their leaders’ capabilities
• All individuals should be able to rely on their leaders for fair treatment, especially when it comes to growth opportunities and development within the business

Be transparent:
• Share information openly by keeping the team updated on what’s going on in the business
• Provide regular feedback. As part of one-to-ones and appraisals show how employees are tracking toward their performance goals (both positively and constructively)
• Create an environment where employees feel at ease voicing their opinions

Be authentic:
• Authentic leadership demonstrates union between the leader’s values and beliefs and their behaviour – they ‘walk the talk’. Being an authentic leader means you understand your way of leading and make decisions that reflect your ethics, values, and personality
• Authentic leaders continually seek opportunities to learn and grow through feedback, action, experience, and reflection

Next steps?

You should consider using a staff survey to discover the current feeling towards working within your business.

You should have regular informal meetings to listen, to give and receive feedback, and to thank employees. Encourage two-way communication and set up a feedback mechanism. This will help to encourage openness and transparency.

Share your vision and mission with your teams to ensure they understand how they and their roles fit into the overall successes of the business.

Useful additional reading

Lewis A. Good leadership? It all starts with trust. 26 October 2022. Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning.
Gavin M. Authentic leadership. What is it, and why it’s important. 10 December 2019. Harvard Business School Online.
Inside Thomson Reuters Blog. 20 ways employees at Thomson Reuters are motivated by their work. Thomson Reuters.