Employee Motivation is a wonderful topic because we want to help motivate people and sometimes our efforts can backfire.

Do people see you as human? Do they feel your care?

The first thing that I would suggest is, connect with the people on your team as human beings. One of the reasons behind this is, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

We will be able to work more smoothly together in a team if we know each other enough to understand each other’s motivations and where each other is coming from.

I have a client who runs a big office and he was having some conflicts with one of the people on his team. I suggested to him, what if you just took this person out to lunch sometime and you just said, “Hey, I’d like to do a get to know you lunch.”

Now one of his concerns was wanting to separate business from private life. And I said, “I understand that. That makes sense. However, if the relationship is such that there’s trust, and if there’s trust then there’s ease, don’t you see that that can carry over to your professional relationship?” And he said, “Yeah, I can totally see that.”

So I recommend showing up as a human being and relating to the people on your team or the people under you in the organization human to human, separate from the roles, although the roles are there. Really show a genuine interest in how people are doing and be there human to human.

You’ll find that people are much more responsive when they trust that their needs matter to you.

Unilateral vs win-win — which leadership style is more motivating?

The second thing that I would put out there with regards to employee motivation is that, if your style of being a boss or a supervisor or a manager, whatever your role its, if your style is “my way or the highway, do it or else,” and you tend to manipulate people with bribes or threats, or other forms of manipulation, in the long run people won’t trust that their needs matter so much to you. Over time if people aren’t trusting that their needs don’t matter to you, then it’s likely that your needs will matter less to them.

So what I’d like you to consider is that the energy with which we do things for each other is just as important as the action itself. I want to motivate the people who work for me, who work in my organizations. I want to motivate them to do their best work but only when it also meets their needs.

If someone is doing something out of guilt, out of shame, out of fear that maybe they’ll get punished, out of duty, obligation, out of should or have-to’s, then the quality of their work will be lesser. They will enjoy coming to work less. And if they’re constantly associating me with fear, fear, fear, guilt, guilt, guilt, shame, shame, shame, any kind of manipulation, then in the long run they are going to resent it. My organization is going to pay a price. Team morale will be lower, and I’m going to have much higher employee turnover. So I want the place where I work to be a place that people really enjoy being.

The connection is part of that, and recognizing that the energy with which we do anything for each other is just as important as the action itself.

So that’s another piece about employee motivation is helping people connect with their reasons for doing the work that I also want them to do. Now if we share the same reasons, we’re both on the same page, then there’s no conflict and we have an enjoyable, harmonious, and very productive team.

Invite Vision Partners for Higher Employee Motivation

The third thing that I would invite you to consider when thinking about employee motivation is to invite the people who work with you, who work for you, who work within your team, within your organizations, invite them in as vision partners. Invite them to share the vision that you have for the work you’re doing. And, help them to become role-owners. One of the things that people really enjoy in their work is having a certain level of autonomy and seeing a direct correlation between their efforts and the work that they’re doing. So keep in mind that you can invite the people on your team to be partners in the vision and to also be owners of whatever role they’re preforming in the organization.

Employee Motivation requires that I see that my actions matter

The fourth thing that I want to put out there that’s highly overlooked in so many workplaces is gratitude and appreciation. There are two reasons for gratitude and appreciation.

One is, it’s part of giving people feedback. We all want our words and actions to contribute and the gratitude and appreciation lets us know that we’re hitting the mark.

Also it’s just merely a celebration. So rather than manipulating people into doing the same action over and over, we’re simply letting them know how it impacted us and that their actions really do contribute.

One of the most enlightened business owners I know starts every meeting with his managers with a gratitude and appreciation round. It’s not necessarily toward other people sitting at the table, but just something that I enjoyed about my day, or something that I appreciated that day.