Surrounding yourself with the best professionals in the field, as well as trusted people, helps you achieve success but can prove futile if you don’t know how to motivate a team. Do you know how to stimulate collaboration among your employees and maximize their productivity?
If you have never asked yourself this question, you have already made the first mistake. Don’t make any more: carve out some time to read this guide carefully and you will discover why it is important to motivate employees, what strategies are most effective in this area, and how you need to manage the most frequent group dynamics within a work environment.
Motivating the work team: why it matters
The first step in learning how to motivate staff, as already pointed out, is to understand the importance of this in creating and organizing the work team.
Motivation as the key to success
There is a quote from Jane Smith that explains in a few simple words why knowing how to motivate a work team is very, very important:
“Business productivity is a direct result of your team’s energy and passion. Invest in their well-being and you will see results grow.”
Motivation, then, is the key to success, but it can take various forms and aspects: for example, there are those who, in order to get out of bed each morning and prepare enthusiastically for a day’s work, need to feel that their work has a tangible and relevant purpose and impact. Other workers, on the other hand, prefer to focus on opportunities for professional growth. Then there are people who, at work, place more importance on the possibility of having pleasant relationships with colleagues. The “secret,” then, is knowing your employees and knowing how best to motivate them.
Benefits of a motivated team
Probably, knowing that your employees can come to the workplace in a better mood was not enough to make you realize the importance of motivating your work team; what will surely convince you, however, is knowing the benefits this can have on your startup.
Motivating your work team allows you, first and foremost, to foster collaboration among employees and to more effectively engage top talent so that you can achieve goals that, otherwise, you could not even imagine. A motivated team is more resourceful and determined in overcoming the challenges it faces. Not only that, it is also more eager to see the company achieve success because each worker will see it as a personal success as well as a group success, and as a result all of this helps build a winning company culture.
Effective strategies for motivating a team
Have we convinced you? Do you understand now why it is important to provide the right motivation to your employees? Well, now you need to learn how to motivate a team. As already mentioned, different people find their daily motivation in different aspects, and for this reason, the strategies for motivating a team are also different. We have identified four of the most effective ones.
Clear and open communication
First and foremost, it is crucial to promote clear and open communication. Being direct, honest, and transparent ensures that employees are clear about their role in the work group and their personal tasks, as well as the business goals and overall priorities of the work team. This has an obvious benefit on their performance.
Remember that it is the responsibility of the manager to set the tone of communications within the work group, but a manager also has a duty to adapt his or her communication style to the people in front of him or her, to “read” his or her surroundings, and, above all, to listen to his or her interlocutors. Communication, in fact, must be bi-directional.
Recognition and appreciation of work
Motivating workers also means rewarding them at the right time. All workers, after all, want to feel part of a team, but they also want to be appreciated and valued as individuals.
Showing proper recognition for an employee’s work can have an incredible impact on his or her self-esteem, mood and, consequently, future performance.
Conversely, if a worker does not feel sufficiently appreciated and valued, a feeling of frustration will grow in him or her, with the risk (indeed, the certainty) that he or she will render less on the job and be ready to say goodbye to the company at the first useful opportunity.
You should know that a salary that is deemed inadequate is one of the main reasons why a worker decides to leave a company. Therefore, be concerned about paying people what they are worth and provide bonuses for the most challenging tasks that are successfully done if you want to retain talent.
Involvement in decision-making processes
Valuing employees also means involving them wherever possible in the company’s decision-making processes. This way, in fact, you show that you know and appreciate their skills and qualities.
As mentioned, listening to your employees is important, so you should encourage their feedback and push them to express their views calmly. Don’t think you can control everything: delegating some tasks and decisions often makes a difference in managing a work team.
Recognition of others’ abilities comes, as mentioned, through an adequate salary, but not only that: equally important is entrusting responsibilities in line with skills.
Providing opportunities for growth and development
Matching the right role to the skills of each worker is very important, but it is not enough: you must also provide employees (especially the most qualified ones) with opportunities for professional growth and development within the company. Remember that the work must be challenging, and it must be challenging every day.
A very good strategy is to provide workers with continuous training, which encourages them to improve and challenges them to advance in their careers (within the company, of course). A worker “forced” to repeat the same tasks every day, with no chance of advancing in rank, will not be slow to turn to another employer who is more attentive to the professional growth of its employees.
Managing group dynamics
Managing group dynamics is a component that has a major impact on the motivation of the various team members. Do not underestimate this factor and, indeed, focus your attentions on three aspects in particular.
Conflict Resolution
Resolving conflicts in a timely manner without repercussions is critical to keeping the mood of the entire work team high and nipping misunderstandings, frictions, jealousies and vendettas in the bud.
As a group leader, you must be able to listen and see everything around you and, above all, be proactive: that is, you must try to prevent any possible cause of discontent before it occurs. Objectivity and impartiality are other indispensable requirements: you must treat all group members fairly, avoiding any possible accusations of favoritism.
But how to handle conflicts in concrete terms? Each situation is, of course, unique, but, in general, it is a good idea to talk separately with each person involved in the conflict and, subsequently, arrange a clarifying meeting between the parties. Again, where possible (i.e., when the conflict does not involve matters covered by privacy or such situations), you could ask for the opinion of the whole team so that you have a more complete view of what happened.
Provide constructive feedback
Feedback, both incoming and outgoing, is crucial to building a constructive relationship with the whole team. Yours must always be constructive: this means that, in addition to coming at the right time (always take time for negative feedback to avoid acting impulsively), it must also be in the right form and content.
Some practical tips for you: avoid formulas such as “always” or “never” and phrases with too “patronizing” a tone, use a welcoming and understanding tone, provide clear practical directions to solve and avoid comparisons between colleagues.
Promoting collaboration and team spirit
Comparisons between colleagues could generate envy and jealousy. On the contrary, it is very important to promote collaboration and team spirit within the work team.
If you want to learn how to motivate a team, be careful not to underestimate the importance of team-building activities: working side by side every day does not always allow employees to get to know each other and strengthen bonds, and for this very reason, shared team-building experiences conducted outside the workspace have become increasingly common in recent years.
These activities, which momentarily “disrupt” the daily routine and hierarchies of the work environment, are aimed at creating new modes of interaction among team members. The great advantage is that these new modes of interaction will later prove to be very useful at work, providing the assist in building a more peaceful and productive work environment.
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