How to Improve Employee Motivation and Commitment
[In the long term, employee motivation and well-being strongly influence organizational health, customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as financial success.]
One of the greatest challenges that managers face today is ensuring that their employees stay motivated and involved in their work. Studies demonstrate this clearly: a happy and engaged employee is more productive, more creative, has fewer absences, and is more loyal to their company. In addition, in the long term, employee motivation and well-being strongly influence organizational health, customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as financial success.
Provide a pleasant working environment
Striving to continually improve employee well-being ensures a number of benefits. However, professional well-being stems above all else from the ability to complete one’s work in pleasant working conditions.
To start off, provide your employees with a well-maintained, light, and pleasant workspace. Ensure that all employees have their own clean and comfortable, if possible, even customized workspace. Also consider offering flexible working hours to your employees. When it is compatible with your work activities, don’t be afraid of suggesting remote working, which will give your teams more responsibility and independence, and therefore will increase their general levels of motivation, elevating work-related stress.
Promote personal development
Employees who feel competent in their work are more likely to be proactive and creative. As a manager, it is therefore both possible to step in and develop your employee’s technical skills, but also their more personal skills (the much talked about “soft skills”). Pay close attention to your employees’ needs in terms of their personal development. Be warned, however, that these needs are rarely expressed explicitly. They manifest themselves above all in your employees’ levels of tension, fatigue, or stress. If you notice that one or several of your employees are in need of support, do offer them development opportunities.
Value individual as well as collective achievements
Motivation and engagement are also a matter of recognition. As managers, you must do everything in your power to make your employees feel as valued as possible, both as individuals and as work teams.
Recognition can take several forms. First of all, we can give traditional thanks and congratulations. Do not forget to publicly showcase all victories, whether big or small.
Bring in a written line of communication dedicated to acknowledgements between colleagues. Checking in with your employees and taking an interest in their lives beyond the workplace also contributes to the creation of a real sense of belonging and commitment.
Improve manager-employee relations
If the atmosphere within teams needs to be tended to, the same goes for the relationship between manager and employee. In 2013, la Dares revealed that “hostile relations with one’s boss are the main cause of employee departures. To ensure the long-term commitment of your teams, direct managers must therefore strive to foster healthy relations with their employees. To achieve this, they need to stick to the “3 Es” rule:
- Empathy: Managers need to put themselves in other people’s shoes to understand them better. For this, nothing beats being a good listener! Listening to your speaker from a neutral standpoint allows you to distance yourself from your own system of knowledge, of values and beliefs, and to shift your focus away from your own point of view.
- Equity: Managers must continually provide fair working conditions and a fair environment to their employees. Be careful however, equity does not mean equality! It is not a question of providing exactly the same thing to everyone, but rather of constantly adapting to everyone’s individual needs, which can differ according to job position, seniority, experiences, personal values, expectations, etc.
- Exemplarity: Finally, a manager must be an example to others! Managers need to both represent the company’s values and be model workers for their employees. Their behavior will serve as a basis for the working practices that their team will emulate. Thus, it is important that managers be the first to respect the rules that govern teams.
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