Motivation is a two way street where you walk hand in hand with your organisation: both motivated? You accelerate. One of the two is not? You walk with a weight that will never allow you to speed up.
I guess it is obvious to everyone, even from personal experience that when the work seems trivial or repetitive, it is particularly difficult to keep an adequate level of attention and productivity among your resources.
It doesn’t matter if your people lack of enthusiasm lies in the fact that they are bored, feel uninvolved, or just don’t like the job, it’s basically the same problem: a lack of motivation. And often the first thing a manager does is think about the type of work, while, most often, the problem arises for something much more complex: the work environment and the context that has been created.
Your task (and not a simple one) as a manager is to create a fair environment and have motivated resources who find easier to be productive.
How to do it?
- Share the results and praise often when deserved. Give them even “soft” recognition but make them feel participatory in the result you get as a team and as a company. Through achieving even small benefits, they will be more motivated to do their part to obtain goals. No challenging signals are needed, but they just need to be relevant for the employee: even a program that gives them incentives that they can share with their families is a motivating factor. You don’t need big things, you need them to be relevant.
- Value the work. Help them understand why their work is important. The company they (and you) work for exists not only to pay the salary, but certainly for wider reasons. I think that all of us as managers are clear, but, perhaps, our resources live “only” in everyday life, which translates into the management of the ordinary and, from time to time, of peaks. Make sure they see how their work contributes to the company’s ultimate goals and how valuable it is. You might be surprised to find that it’s not even something they think about, all busy with the Business As Usual.
- Pay attention to the work environment. Keep the work environment clear, clean and stimulating. Imagine a group of people working in a sloppy office, with cramped workstations where the copiers are out of ink and the vending machines haven’t worked for weeks. How happy will they be? Not too much I guess. Make sure coming to work is stimulating so that you keep motivation high. As a manager:
- Make sure that workplaces and site are always in order and fitting to both company and people needs
- Organise a breakfast or lunch in the office one day a week
- Make sure all equipment works to keep the job easy to do, is enough complex doing the things to have also to overcome obstacles
- Listen to their needs. If you listen to your resource for even a few minutes, it won’t be too difficult to understand what frightens or motivates them. Talk to each employee and get them to talk about their work and the team. What bothers them? What are they excited about?
