Nobody wants to work in dull and dreary places. It kills your enthusiasm and creativity and makes work a burden. The key to happy, productive, innovative employees is to keep them strongly motivated to working for the good of the company. Here are some ways to keep your employees highly motivated:

#1 – Get to Know Your Employees:

This is one of the most important factors in keeping your employees highly motivated. Every person is different and requires different perks to keep them motivated. Get to know the kind of personality each employee has – some will work best if you keep praising their extra efforts and their hard work. Others will work best if you show interest in them as a person while still others will feel more comfortable with a distant, cool relationship. Some will take criticism as constructive and strive to improve their work, while others will get offended by criticism. Managing each employee both professionally and diplomatically is the key to keeping them motivated.

#2 – Offer Rewards:

Most people are highly motivated when towards achieving a goal, so offer rewards for meeting a particular goal. For example, have an employee of the month award for the most efficient work, or offer material rewards such as a bonus. This will promote healthy competition among your employees and will keep them working hard and giving it their best.

#3 – Make the Workplace Fun and Comfortable:

The workplace is where your employees spend a large part of their day. If it is seen by them as boring, stressful, and dull and dreary, they will lose their motivation to work for its good. Keep the look spacious, light and airy, and offer opportunities for fun and socializing, such as staff picnics, dinners, and office parties. In addition, take special care of hygiene factors. Hire good cleaning staff, and also ensure that the food provided to your employees is hygienic.

#4 – Ensure Democratic Leadership:

Let your employees have a say in how things are run. For instance, meet with them once a week to hear their problems and take their own suggestions for solving them. Making people feel valued is a great way of boosting their self esteem, leading to better motivation. In addition, allow them some independence as far as working methods are concerned. It gets difficult to stick to very hard and fast specifications, so allow them room for a little variety. Appreciate the personal touch in their work. Employees work best when allowed to follow their own methods of working, and this boosts their productivity dramatically.

#5 – Enrich Your Employees’ Job Experience:

Create little challenges and an environment of healthy competition among your employees. Delegate tasks of a suitable difficulty level to each employee, according to the level of interest they exhibit. Making their job more challenging makes them feel better when they actually do a good job, and keeps them working harder to outdo their own achievements. Appreciating an employee when they rise to meet a challenge is very important for maintaining their motivation level.

#6 – Allow Room for Error:

To err is human, so lessen your employees’ stress level by forgiving the occasional error or lapse. Be understanding when they have problems and ensure that you are always approachable – they should not be afraid of coming to tell you that there has been a mistake. Always have a plan B in hand for when something goes wrong. Ensure that your employees do not try to cover up their mistakes by pointing fingers at others. Strongly discourage the blame culture. This way, you not only keep your staff highly motivated, but also win genuine respect from your subordinates.

How do you keep your employees motivated? Long hours, high pressure, tight deadlines, and all the other stresses and strains of employment can contribute to the deflation of employee motivation. Your recognition/reward systems are typically the counter to this depreciation.

The problem with motivating a workforce is that individuals are not necessarily motivated by the same criteria. So rather than implement watered-down attempts at catch-all solutions that cater to the lowest common denominator, it is advisable to determine and apply motivators on an individual basis. In larger companies, however, this is often impossible.

#1 Money Matters!

The one motivator that applies to every employee is, of course, money. Remuneration is the primary reason why we work. A fair, living wage is the cornerstone of the motivated employees that underpin a successful business. All other motivators are built on this one. Without it, they are useless.

However, let’s assume you pay your employees well. What else can you do to decrease employee turnover and increase loyalty, morale, and productivity?

#2 Supervisor Appreciation

Though money is well established as the primary motivator, many studies have shown that employees often rank supervisor appreciation higher. For example, the motivational guru, Bob Nelson, mentioned in his Workforce article, “More than anything else, employees want to be valued for a job well done by those they hold in high esteem.”

#3 Control

People like to have some semblance of control over their work, to avoid feeling like mindless automatons. Having an input on decision making and a clearly defined roster of responsibility enhances an employee’s self-worth, which acts as its own motivator.

#4 Belonging

Hierarchical transparency enables employees to feel like they are part of a group working towards a common goal. If management share their decision-making processes with the workforce it invariably breeds inclusion and group harmony, which in turn foster communal motivation and all its satellite benefits.

#5 Growth and Development

The opportunity to learn new skills and develop existing ones is a prime motivator for most people in a personal development capacity. Education and training allow us to realize a closer proximity to our potential that increases personal satisfaction and subsequently acts as a great motivator.

#6 Clearly Defined Leadership

Employees prefer a clear structure to work with. Distinct expectations and well-defined goals give them a framework that can optimize their performance. This structure is provided by effective communication from strong leadership.

#7 Performance Recognition

In addition to the typical bonus schemes employed by many companies, employees also want underperformers fired or at least, downgraded in pay. Performance-dependant pay has been shown to be one of the premier motivators available.

Ira Kay and Bruce Pfau’s The Human Capital Edge illustrated that employers underrate the importance of flexible work schedules and advancement opportunities to employees. This means that many employers focus their motivational efforts in areas that don’t connect quite as well with their employees. If you can accurately determine what your employees actually want, rather than what you think they want, you may find a surprising discrepancy.

photo courtesy of Lauren Kennedy, Flickr

The Big Book of Team-Motivating Games: Spirit-Building, Problem-Solving and Communication Games for Every Group (Big Book Series) (Paperback)

Emotional Intelligence for Managing Results in a Diverse World: The Hard Truth about Soft Skills in the Workplace (Hardcover)

Monday Morning Motivation: Five Steps to Energize Your Team, Customers, and Profits (Hardcover)

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Even the most deserving of pride flounder in the riptide of doubt. Self motivation is an essential component of success. Without it, every set back, no matter how minor, would be a disaster. The self-motivated individual treats failures as learning experiences, and strives ever onward toward his or her goal. But how do you motivate yourself? How do you defeat procrastination? It’s easier than you might think.

Maintain a Positive Attitude

Learn by doing. If you are generally a negative person, start behaving in a positive manner. Give compliments. Look for the good in every situation. Force yourself to look on the bright side. By doing you train yourself to behave that way, and eventually, think that way. In the same vein, shut out negative people and opinions. By focusing on the positive, your plans and actions will, by default, also become positive. Brace yourself to succeed, rather than avoid failure.

Dream

Only when you have a dream of what you can accomplish will you motivate yourself to pursue it effectively. Identify your dream.

Start With a Single, Small Step

You have to start somewhere. A small step is all it takes. It may feel like you have a mountain climb ahead of you, but all these things are achieved incrementally. How do you think we got to the Moon? That’s right, an inch at a time. So focus on short-term goals that stepping-stone to your greater dreams. It’s a lot easier once you’ve started, so get going!

Avoid Procrastination

Procrastination kills success. Delaying the inevitable is really kind of pointless. You have to do it sometime, so why not do it now? A good way to avoid accumulating and reinforcing your propensity for procrastination is to take frequent breaks. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, or focus for a short time on another issue every couple of hours. It really does make a difference.

Be Consistent

Regulate your actions to a steady rhythm, so you’re making progress every day. Work the same hours every day so it becomes habitual. Chances are, a while after you begin your project, your enthusiasm will start to wane. If you’ve built up the habit of working on it, though, the structure can carry you through. You may need to refocus and strengthen your desire to succeed. Commitment is your watch word.

Most Importantly, Never Quit!

If you have a concrete plan and a solid procedure, you will succeed. All you need is the motivation to progress through your structure. Use role models as sources of inspiration. If they were in the same situation, ask yourself what they would do. By imagining them in your shoes you’ll be that much closer to matching their success with your own.

Motivation. Why we do stuff. It would seem pretty straightforward at first glance. Most of us would suggest it’s because we get some reward, whether tangible or not, as a consequence of our actions; an incentive is apparent at the conclusion and is known as The Incentive Theory of Motivation. There are six other main theories of motivation:

Need Theories

Championed by Abraham Maslow, the famed Hierarchy of Needs describes a pyramid of motivating needs that must be met before advancement to the next level, starting with physiological needs such as breathing, water, sex and food (though not necessarily in that order!), then safety needs such as warmth, shelter and security.

photo courtesy of Guillaume Brunet, Flickr

The pyramid continues upwards with love and belonging needs, through esteem, and capping out at self-actualization. A self-actualized person is someone whose “regular” needs are all being met. As a result, s/he is pretty much at peace with him or herself, living creatively, vitally, and meaningfully.

Before his death in 1970, Maslow suggested there was another level above actualization; self-transcendence. Think of people like Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama to give you an idea.

Drive-reduction theories

These theories suggest it is our biological drives that motivate us to act. Drives like hunger, thirst and sex. These drives increase in salience over time until they are sated, when the drive temporarily diminishes.

Clearly, this does not paint a complete picture of human motivational behavior. For example, it does not account for secondary reinforcers of behavior such as money.

Broad Theories

A relatively new concept in motivational theories is the “Onion-Ring-Model of Achievement Motivation” by Heinz Schuler, George C. Thornton III, Andreas Frintrup and Rose Mueller-Hanson. The concept is based on the premise that broad constituents of personality promotes performance motivation. As such, a range of dimensions not usually regarded as being involved are attributed to professional success. It combines the usually separate ideas of Need for Achievement with social motives such as control or dominance.

Cognitive Theories

Cognitive motivational theories centre around goal theory, wherein people strive towards clearly established end states. The efficiency of the goal is dependant on three measures; proximity, difficulty and specificity. Proximity refers to the time between behavior initiation and achievement of the end state and is inversely proportional to motivation magnitude; the less time, the more motivation. Which is why most kids would rather learn to ride a bike than do their algebra homework. Difficulty is self-explanatory. Specificity describes the clarity of the goal. If we don’t know exactly what it is we’re going to get, we don’t strive quite so hard to achieve it.

Models of Behavior Change

Motivation is regarded as a process that culminates in the molding of behavioral intentions. Volition is described as the process that bridges intent and actual behavior. Motivation is the setting of the goal, whereas volition is the pursuit of that goal.

Unconscious Motivation

If we delve into the psychoanalytical, we find, according to Maslow, “Psychoanalysis has often demonstrated that the relationship between a conscious desire and the ultimate unconscious aim that underlies it need not be at all direct.” In other words, motives that may seem obvious may well not be. For example, eating can be a defensive measure to combat lack of attention, rather than to satisfy a drive or need.

As can be seen, describing behavior is something of a toss-up. Many motivational theories co-exist, describing the same things in different ways.

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Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory was developed by Abraham Maslow. It is a theory that is widely known and recognized and follows a five-level hierarchy format:

1. Physiological. Basic needs that include the need for food, water and shelter
2. Safety. These needs are the desire to feel safe, secure and free from threats.
3. Belonging. This is the need to feel that you are affiliated with other people and accepted by them.
4. Esteem. A desire to have a positive self-image and to be appreciated and valued by other people.
5. Self-actualization. The need to develop our skills and capabilities in order to reach our full potential.

So how does Maslows theory of motivation play out in real life. Let’s take an example of a teenaged girl. By all accounts anyone looking from the outside in would think the parents of this girl are pushing her too hard. Katie has been a self-motivated learner from a very early age. She has been reading since she was four and at the age of 14 can read in three different languages.

Katie started studying the piano at the age of six and at the age of eight, decided the guitar would be fun to learn. She has no problem finding the time to practice and in fact looks forward to her practice time.

Katie also likes to be a part of the soccer and volleyball teams at school. She has no problem getting her homework done successfully while at the same time attending practices and games. I’m sure you are not surprised to hear that Katie is at the top of her class academically. In fact she is in the accelerated program in her high school. If Katie is going to be involved with something she wants to make sure it is good quality. She certainly doesn’t want to be part of a team or organization that does not strive for excellence.

Now, I have a question for you and be honest with yourself, while reading about Katie were you thinking that her parents are pushing this girl way too hard and she must be miserable because there is no way she WANTS to do all of this? But that is not at all the case. Not only is Katie happy, she is friendly and considerate of others at all times. She is happy and has a great outlook on life.

Without knowing it Katie is applying Maslow’s theory of motivation in her life.

Psychologist, Abraham Maslow, created a group of human needs believed he had to be present in people’s lives in a certain order for them to be well balanced, successful, and happy. Maslow believed that once these needs were met in the order listed above it was a natural thing to have success in life.

The needs as Maslow lists them go from the most basic of needs, number 1. food, water, shelter; to the most complex with number 5. self-actualization being the most complex. Maslow believed the most basic needs had to be satisfied first and then you could move up to the next levels, one at a time. Maslow taught that people reached their full potential and continued growth as they moved up this “ladder,” so to speak, of needs.

I would say Katie’s parents have successfully taught her, albeit unknowingly, to follow Maslow’s theory of motivation.