Posted on April 5th 2021 - Jason Desaulniers
A key driving force to improve productivity in the workplace is motivation. It’s what encourages your employees to get out of bed in the morning, go to the office, and do their job to the best of their abilities. It’s what inspires them to work with a smile on their faces.
The tricky part is figuring out how you can encourage your staff to be more self-motivated in their jobs.
To help you out, we’ve put together five key things you can do to help foster self-motivation and improve productivity in the workplace.
Implement these tips in your business to help motivate your team and drive the productivity of your company forward.
1. Measure the current productivity & performance of your team
When beginning your journey to improve productivity in the workplace, it’s always a good idea to begin with a clear starting point and future plan, so you can see how your team progresses over time.
Start by measuring and evaluating your team’s current productivity.
Ask yourself:
- How fast are your employees completing tasks?
- Are the tasks all done correctly?
- Are your customers satisfied with the goods or services?
Answering these types of questions will give you a baseline to go from. A great way to track this is by implementing weekly scorecards.
Measure key things that impact your business and assign responsibilities to each metric. This gives your employees a clear picture of what they are working towards and why and gives you a look into the trends of numbers and what needs to be done to improve.
After you’ve implemented your motivation techniques, you can see how the strategies improve productivity by comparing them to your baseline.
You can also measure productivity overall, the entire team, or on an individual level. This will help you get a better insight into what’s helping or holding back motivation and productivity.
Now that you’ve got your starting point marked down, it’s time to start implementing some strategies to help foster self-motivation in the workplace.
2. Reward & recognize your employees for their hard work
Rewarding your employees is a great way to not only show appreciation but also improve their job satisfaction. The more your employees are satisfied with their jobs, the more they’ll be inclined to work better, faster and more efficiently.
Giving your team extra incentives will help increase employee loyalty and boost their morale.
You can give them rewards like:
- A gym membership
- Discounts for certain businesses
- An extra day off
- Tickets to the movies
- A meal out
- Fun team bonding events
These little perks might not seem like much, but they have the ability to improve the lives of your staff and help enrich the team dynamic. Plus, the happier your employee is working for you, the more self-motivated they’ll become.
Always acknowledge & recognize great work
Along with rewarding your employees for good work you should also acknowledge their work. This significantly contributes to the improvement of employee motivation.
70% of employees say that their motivation and morale is improved when they’re recognized for their hard work.
If your employee puts a lot of effort into a project and produces outstanding results then acknowledge it. If you don’t acknowledge it, they might feel disheartened and have less motivation to perform as well on their next project.
Employee recognition should be continuous, frequent, and meaningful to help increase motivation and productivity in the workplace.
84% of workers say that praise should be given on a continual basis.
3. Get the right tools to improve your team’s productivity in the workplace
Your team’s skills are a great asset to your company and an essential part of their performance. But, the tools they use for their work also play an important role.
Choosing the right software and installing the right programs for your employees helps make their job easier and improve productivity in the workplace.
Tools to track time & productivity
With a limited number of hours in the workday and a long list of tasks to complete, it can be a bit overwhelming to keep track of all the work you’re doing.
Make it easy for your team to keep up with all their tasks by introducing time tracking applications. You can use time tracking apps like:
These applications make it super easy to track your team’s hours and productivity. This will help improve your team’s efficiency and help you streamline your workload so it all gets done on time.
With these tools, you can assign projects and tasks to various team members, so they’ll know exactly what needs to be done. With the ability to track their time more easily, they’ll be able to do their tasks more efficiently, and you can identify any roadblocks.
Tools for team collaboration
Being able to collaborate with your team online, especially in times like this when a lot of people are working from home, is a huge bonus. Online collaboration tools help promote and simplify teamwork, and they help your projects go smoothly.
You can use project management apps like Hubstaff Tasks or Teamwork to keep track of projects. You can use file storage and access apps like Google Drive, Google Docs and Dropbox to keep all your project files together.
Work cohesively online with your team to help improve productivity.
Tools to improve communication
Communication is the key to improving productivity in the workplace. The best way to improve communication is to use some communication tools. If you’re working in an office or as a remote team, then communication applications are a must.
Emails work, but it’s so easy to lose track of individual messages, and if it goes into the spam folder, it won’t be seen for weeks.
Instant messaging apps like Slack or Twist are your best bet. They’re excellent at keeping conversations organized per project, and messages are easy to keep track of.
Most of these communication platforms allow you to share files too, which helps improve productivity even further by streamlining your team’s workflow.
4. Set clear SMART goals
If you want to help foster self-motivation and improve your team’s productivity in the workplace, then you’re going to have to set some SMART goals.
To get the best results, always make sure the goals you set are SMART:
An example of this: I want to increase the sales of XYZ widget by 15% by the end of the quarter.
- Specific: Increase the sales of XYZ widget
- Measurable: 15%
- Achievable: Having the right amount of resources to attain it.
- Realistic: Within reason of the 15%. The goal isn’t overly aggressive and is realistic for your team to achieve.
- Time-Bound: End of the quarter. It can’t be SMART if it doesn’t have a deadline.
Remember to focus all your efforts on your goals, monitor everything that goes well with them, and quickly tweak anything that isn’t working how you want it to.
Not only can SMART goals be set for your company, but they can also be set for your individual employees.
Ask them what their SMART goals are for their career. Get them to write it down with a personal development plan – this gives them a clear end goal to work towards.
By getting each of your employees to write down their SMART goals, they’ll be more motivated to work in order to achieve their chosen goals.
With SMART goals, they’ll understand why they’re being asked to do the tasks they’re assigned, which means they’re more likely to work harder to complete them.
5. Be a self-motivated boss
Finally, one of the most important parts of fostering self-motivation and improving productivity in the workplace is being self-motivated yourself.
If you lead by example and are motivated to do your own job, then your staff will follow. Inspire your team to be productive and encourage them to do better for the company by being motivated yourself.
If you use all these tips to help improve your team’s motivation, then you should be on the right track to improving productivity in your workplace.
If you’re looking to put some great benefits in place for your employees to get them motivated, call us today, and we’ll help you put the right plan in place.
Our team can look over your current benefits plan and discuss any new options available for you.