As a team leader, you are responsible for the outcome and performance of that team. In order to achieve great things, you need to have correctly motivated and inspired team members. This can feel like a task that is hard to crack. But, don’t fear – this post summarizes our 10 top tips on how to keep your team motivated… enjoy!
1. Be a supportive leader
This is perhaps the most obvious tip on our list of tips on how to keep your team motivated. Yet, not one to be ignored! One way to ensure your employees are correctly inspired and motivated is to offer a supportive and safe network. You should be supporting your team in times of huge success and in times of catastrophic failure.
This network should be built on trust, encouragement and mutual respect. One thing to promote in your team is ‘psychological safety‘. This idea focuses on being able to show one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career. When a team has psychological safety, all members feel accepted, respected and supported. There is an abundance of research to demonstrates that psychological safety in teams has a number of benefits, including increased creative performance.
2. Be motivated yourself
Following on from being a supportive leader, you must also lead by example and be incredibly motivated yourself. The passion, enthusiasm and inspiration of a great leader is profusely contagious and will spark motivation in those who follow.
To ensure your team know that you mean business, attempt to display obvious signs of passion and drive. Always work hard, be on your A game and remain positive.
3. Encourage and promote teamwork
Running a team that promotes cohesive teamwork encourages ideas and workloads to be shared. This takes the pressure off, keeps spirits high and ensures that everyone is motivated. Effective and cohesive teamwork will make even the biggest of tasks feel small and manageable.
4. Create a common vision and goal
When everyone is working cohesively towards the same common goal and vision, they will feel united. And united teams feel a sense of accountability, and thus motivation, to be productive and reach these goals.
To create effective team goals, gather your team members together and discuss every single persons vision for the team. From this, reach an agreement on what the collective goal should be and ensure that every team member is aware of these goals and how they personally can work towards them.
You might also find it useful to write your teams goals and visions down and display them around the office. This way, everyone in the team is constantly reminded of what you all, collectively, want to achieve.
5. Recognize and reward team members
To truly motivate your employees, you should be looking out for and recognizing their talent and exceptional hard work at every opportunity.
People thrive on recognition and positive praise. Therefore, you should reward every team member for reaching big milestones, completing deadlines or demonstrating high-quality work
To recognize talents and hard word, you can offer bonuses, raises or even small words of gratitude and appreciation.
6. Be transparent
Another tip to keep your team motivated is to create a sense of trust, openness and respect. The best way to do this is to be transparent with them. Allow them to trust you with both personal and professional issues.
To be transparent, you should communicate openly with your team and keep them in the loop of any decisions made. Where possible, the employee’s input and opinion should be the most influencing factor of any decision you, as the team leader, makes.
7. Encourage friendly competition
A touch of healthy competition can do wonders for any team. However, ensure that this doesn’t turn into conflict (if you have any team conflict, check out this article on how to resolve it).
A bit of healthy competition can be a catalyst for innovation, creative ideas and improvement. To promote this friendly competition you can:
- Reward your top performers. This will motivate your team to work harder and put more work as they know that their exceptional efforts will be rewarded.
- Introduced ‘stretch goals’. These are goals that aim to help team members beat their previous goals. For instance, if in the last project your employee made an X amount of profit, their goal for the next project is to top this and make even more profit.
- Create friendly competition outside of work by using team building opportunities. For example, everyone loves a friendly game of rounders or cricket.
8. Treat every team member uniquely
Every single member of your team if different, so treat them like this. Some people are motivated by the end goal, other people will be motivated by each small steps. So consider this when motivating each team member and find a way that works for them.
9. Eliminate boredom and dissatisfaction
Boredom will suck the motivation, drive and enthusiasm out of even the most ambitious employees. To eliminate any boredom you can:
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- Regularly switch tasks up in your team so that everyone gets to try a slightly different role. Each role offers different experiences and responsibilities, keeping it exciting and engaging.
- Encourage employees to switch up their schedules so that there is variety within each day.
- Speak regularly to your team members. Ask them how they feel, whether they are dissatisfied with any aspect of their work and how they feel this can be fixed.
- Create fun activities, such as going go-karting or throwing drink parties outside of work.
10. Offer flexible working
Our final top tip on how to motivate your team is to offer flexible working hours. This can be hard to do and sometimes not feasible. But, if it is possible to do this, it will really increase the motivation of your employees.
To do this:
- Establish a clear process for how flexible working within the organization and ensure that it is documented and circulated throughout all of the employees.
- Define the roles and responsibilities that employees, line manager and HR personnel will have in making these flexible hours work within your company.
- Communication is key when implementing flexible working hours. Make sure that each employee has someone that they can directly report to and check in with.
- Review and set high standard goals and make them trackable so that you can be certain that all your employees are working to the best of their ability.
