Well, it’s a matter of days until Christmas and if you are planning to work right up until Christmas Eve – and maybe over the festive period – keeping staff (and your own) motivation levels up, is key.

After all, motivation is key for an employee’s inner enthusiasm and drive to accomplish activities. This internal drive causes an individual to choose to take action. In their lives, every employee has activities, events, people and goals that they find motivating.

There is no such thing as unmotivated people – just unmotivated workers.

The trick is to figure out how to tap into their motivating and inspire it at work. So how motivated are your people?

Here are 5 Tips on motivating employees to perform:-

1. Build good habits

Improving staff motivation starts with getting people to engage in the right behaviours The mark of a motivated and successful employee is that they’ve developed the habits (repeated behaviours) necessary for success.

As a manager, before you can address habits and influence your people towards higher levels of productivity, you must ensure your people know what behaviours are necessary to do their job effectively.

It goes without saying that the wrong activities will only lead to the wrong habits. There are three factors that managers must consider when structuring their employees’ jobs as these will influence the activities in which they engage and lay the foundation for created a motivational environment.

If people don’t perform there are 3 reasons for it. See Tips 2, 3 and 4 below.

2. Demotivator #1 – employees don’t perform because they don’t k now what the job is

All jobs are composed responsibilities and tasks. Some jobs have more responsibilities and fewer tasks (e.g. a senior manager) whilst other jobs comprise less responsibilities with many more tasks.

Whatever the mix, you must sit down with your people and communicate both sides, what they’re responsible for and what tasks they must engage in order to achieve them. In addition, they must know how they’ll be measure and the minimum standards they must live up to. This is basic stuff, however so often it’s neglected.

3. Demotivator #2 – employees don’t perform because they don’t know how to do the job

It goes without saying that people only do things they know how to do. To ensure this, it’s essential to train your people so that they know what actions are required for success.

The key word here is ACTION. Companies more often unwittingly, educate their people rather than train them, by simply providing them with the knowledge.

Training on the other hand is about changing behaviour and getting action. In the training process knowledge is merely used as a tool or a vehicle. And in the process, management must ensure that people are clear about what is required from them so there’s no confusion.

When people are confused they will not take action, will they?

Confusion doesn’t result from a lack of knowledge (that’s ignorance) but rather from disorganised knowledge.

4. Demotivator #3 – employees don’t perform because someone or something interferes with their desire to perform

The ‘someone’ can range from themselves to management, family, friends or co-workers all of who can create TASK INTERFERENCE.

Task interference can also occur when something as basic as a new procedure makes an employee less productive or it could be something an employee doesn’t have such as proper resources, tools or training. In the fact of task interference, employees may make do for a bit but eventually they will look to management for help, or worse, they’ll just quit.

Another source of interference comes from CONSEQUNCE IMBALANCE in which employees can be doing the right things but they’re not getting any recognition for it or they are doing the wrong thing and not being confronted about it.

Management such as this creates an imbalance that interferes with people’s desire or ability to perform.

5. No quick fix!

There’s no quick or easy fix at the end of the day. No magical one thing that managers can just ‘do’ to their employees to motivate them and make everything better. But by knowing what motivates employees, you can help them develop and draw out the internal motivation on their own.

And that’s done by building belief: in ourselves, in the company and in its products and services. Build a system of belief with every management approach or ideas you implement in the business, and you automatically win.

In fact, use it as a test for any new approach you are thinking to implement: ‘It will build belief in self, company and what we provide to customers.’

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