Your staff are the lifeblood that flows throughout your business. Motivated, happy and experienced staff will tend to produce excellent work in short timeframes, whereas a demotivated workforce will see your productivity plummet. It’s up to you as a manager to think about the ways in which you can inspire your workforce, incentivize them to produce their best work, and hit all of your targets. This article shares some tips on how your management style and approach can help boost your entire team, which will mean higher productivity and higher profits for your firm.
Table of Contents
Motivation
While your team may possess all of the skills required to be productive, they may lack the motivation to put those skills into practice. Business leaders are often left frustrated by low productivity, but it’s ultimately those leaders’responsibility to address it, boosting morale and finding ways to incentivize their workers. This is the same for you: if you see workers who you feel are slacking a little on the job, you should find ways to improve their performance by encouraging them to work harder. You can do this by:
- Setting up bonus and reward schemes for the hardest workers
- Rewarding your entire team from time to time with an away day or a night out
- Managing individuals by taking them aside and giving them positive feedback
- Setting realistic targets for each of your workers, as well as team leaders
All of these methods are regularly used by businesses in order to boost the chances that they will have an entirely motivated workforce who are all pulling in the same direction. If you can institute one or more of these methods, you’ll stand a good chance of encouraging harder work in your firm.
HR Processes
Your workers are managed by HR. In smaller firms, however, it makes little sense to hire an HR professional, who might spend the majority of their time twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the next time they have to facilitate the payroll. This leaves firms with no HR representative, and that means that you have fewer ways in which you can service and provide for your staff. Your staff could be left feeling isolated and undervalued if this is the case in your firm.
In order to address this issue and to save you time in performing basic HR duties, technological solutions have been developed that automate a large portion of the HR process. This helpful guide goes into some detail about how these work and the benefits that such software can bring. Another option is to hire a part-time HR professional and to task them with not only performing the essential tasks of an HR professional but also with conducting surveys and generally finding ways to make your staff happier.
Meetings
One of the most important duties of a manager is to hold meetings with their staff. This is where you’ll give company-wide messages or more individual notes to the staff who need them. Here’s, it’s important that you maintain an open-door policy in order for your staff to feel comfortable coming to you with their problems. Make it clear that you’re always available to talk to your staff and that you’ll drop everything that’s not essential if there’s someone in need of help or support. Of course, that’ll help you show your staff that you care about their wellbeing.
On the other side of the meeting policy is those that you organize yourself. You should endeavor to speak to all of your staff privately at least once a month, as these can be excellent forums for discussions about issues, worries, anxieties – or successes. Meeting with your staff is a privilege and can often be incredibly enlightening. Your staff will usually be happy to give feedback on your performance as well as feedback on the processes through which they perform their work.
Wellbeing
In the past few years, employee wellbeing has reached the top of the social corporate agenda. There’s a good reason why this is the case. As well as giving your staff happier lives in a more motivated and happy environment, boosting wellbeing is also directly correlated with boosted productivity. So there is both a human and a corporate argument for boosting well-being among your ranks, and there are some established ways of doing this:
- Set up a mental health support system, with individuals trained in mental health first aid
- Make sure your workers aren’t starting work too early and leaving too late, which leads to burnout
- Have team leaders report to you about the mental health of their workers so that you know who might be struggling at any given time
- Surprise your staff with an afternoon or even a day off if they’ve put in a good stint for the past few weeks
- Purchase activities and facilities for your office – from a ping-pong table to a modern coffee machine
All of these gestures will help you set the tone in your office, making it a caring and happy environment instead of one that’s purely focused on profits and productivity.
Skills and Training
Finally, it’s worth noting that a highly motivated team can still lack the skills, tools, and resources to actually perform their work well. This is the case in several firms where processes are not in place to facilitate efficient working practices. As such, it’s worth considering what these processes might be that could help to speed up the work performed by your entire workforce.
Think here of new, faster laptops or better, more modern software. Give workers training in key areas of your business so that they’re better equipped to take on challenging tasks. And create internal documents that’ll help your workers learn more about your company, your ambitions, and your vision. These documents should be provided to staff when they are onboarding and should be a useful reference documents for the months and years ahead.
When you’re working as a manager, you know that your performance will directly influence the performance of your team. As such, these tips are all about how you can become a better manager so that your team can pull happily in the same direction.
