6 Ways to Motivate Employees for the New Year
As a business owner, you might already be developing your business plans for the year. One of the most vital aspects you must look into is your human resources. Now is the perfect time to look back at how your employees performed last year and determine the changes and improvements you can make to motivate them to perform better this year. Here are a few suggestions.
Goal Setting
Set up a meeting with your team in order to discuss the vision you have for your business for 2015. Make it a team effort to figure out what your goals are and the action steps and timeline necessary for the team to achieve it. This will let your employees feel that their ideas and contributions are important to you and will motivate them to do their part to ensure the achievement of your goals.
Make your team feel even more excited by discussing big projects that you plan to implement during the year. This will give them something to look forward to and make them more enthusiastic about going to work.
Further, take time to meet with them individually to find out what their individual goals are. Providing them with a career path in your company shows them that you are invested in them and are thinking of retaining them for the long term.
Provide Training
One of the ways you can help your employees achieve their goals and improve themselves is to provide them with opportunities to learn. Since it’s the start of a new year, most people are still keen on trying something new. Take advantage of that and let your employees get trained for a new skill. Your employees will not only be grateful for getting time off from work, but they will also become excited to put their new learnings to good use when they come back.
New Rewards and Benefits
Now is also the right time to review your rewards and benefits package. Get feedback from your employees regarding what worked and what didn’t so that you can make the necessary changes if necessary. You have to give credit where credit is due, and you can do this by rewarding accomplishments such as reaching a quota or closing a big account.
Employees rely a lot on their benefits package especially when it comes to their own and their family’s health. Determine which benefits are useful to them so that you can ensure satisfaction throughout the year and beyond.
Celebrate Milestones
Any milestone achieved by the company or an individual employee is a cause for celebration. Milestones include birthdays, engagement, anniversaries, establishment of a new office, opening of new branches and more. Celebrate them by organizing a party or social gathering. Not only will this motivate employees to keep doing their best but will also encourage them to socialize with each other.
Create a Fun Environment
Nobody wants to work in a boring environment. Bored employees will eventually go off to find other fun work opportunities. While you can’t help some jobs to be naturally tedious, you can still create a fun work environment to keep your employees active and energized. You can encourage friendly competition by organizing contests that don’t necessarily involve work. If you have room in your budget, go out on teambuilding activities every so often.
Foster Creativity
Creativity is one of the most vital traits any employee can have. In fact, studies show that more and more employers are hiring people who show more creativity than others. This is because creative people think out of the box, which can spell success for a business. Allow your employees to get out of their comfort zone and discover new and better ways of doing things not only for themselves, but for the company too.
There are many other ways to motivate employees. The important thing to remember is that your strategies must help create a happy working environment that will give your employees lots of reasons to keep coming back to work every day.
