Motivating Your Staff Is One Of Your Biggest Jobs

If you’re a small business owner or want to be, you probably know your biggest stresses: ensuring you have proper inventory or supplies, shipping and delivery challenges, regulation and more.

Increasingly, staffing is another huge issue. A tight labor market has led to staff woes for everything from restaurants to airlines, in skilled trades to nursing and education. It’s a rare manager or owner who isn’t worried about staff shortages and hiring challenges.

Here’s a related area that pays other dividends as well: motivating your staff and keeping them motivated. Or put another way, inspiring your team can not only provide immediate benefits for existing staff, but it can also mean you have fewer vacancies, higher production and better hiring prospects when you do have open positions.

But motivation is a tough goal for several reasons. It’s a lot more than “rah-rah” speeches. It’s an intangible – it’s difficult to measure results, especially at first. It’s also very individual. One worker may benefit from careful handling. Another might only need a few words. And motivation is a near constant. You may succeed dramatically one day only to need more effort the next.

But motivation is critical, often the difference between winning and losing in everything from sports to health care.

Here are some steps you should consider to win this battle:

• Talk with and listen to your team. Ask staff about their work environment, challenges, and hopes. You can often learn valuable information about your organization and how it functions. Just by listening, you’ll create an environment with positive morale and increased productivity.

• Consider other communications processes like quarterly lunches or other gatherings with selected staff members. Make these efforts relaxed and informal but holding them can help boost communications. Larger meetings can add to overall morale.

• Keep your staff involved in decision-making, especially their work areas. Good examples include equipment or software purchases, even furniture that is in their area. Staff will often have valuable insight into the areas where they work.

• None of this means you should not challenge your staff. If you’ve developed good relationships with your team and they feel they have your support, it will be much easier. If they feel comfortable, many will enjoy a challenge. If they see how that challenge will help the company and in turn help them, staff can become your biggest strength.

• Above all, don’t forget to say “thanks” and recognize achievement. Everyone loves to be praised, and acknowledging staff success is an important part of your efforts and your organization’s success. It may be the most important part.

Simply recognizing that motivation is one of your most important jobs. Unlike a Hollywood movie, motivation is usually not accomplished through speechmaking or posturing, but through your actions and modeling the behavior you want. That’s not easy, but it’s part of the real-world steps you need to make to move your organization forward.