Research indicates that motivation is one of the key drivers of employee productivity in business. Unmotivated workers can produce sub-standard work, leave abruptly, causing staff shortages, and neglect deadlines. They can also affect your overall workplace culture, leading to more unmotivated and unproductive employees. As a business owner, it’s therefore highly important to work to prevent your workers from becoming unmotivated. This can be difficult, however, given that many of us are still working from home, due to the pandemic. This can make socialising and interacting with your colleagues substantially harder. Homeworking can also further exacerbate worker productivity levels if they are already motivated. Fortunately, companies are already deriving new and innovative ways of increasing employee productivity even among work from home employees. Here are just a few ways you can boost employee morale from the comfort of your own home.
- Introduce Incentives
One of the most effective ways to boost your employees’ motivation to work at home or otherwise is to incorporate more incentives into your workplace environment. The most traditional form of this is bonuses for meeting specific targets, such as sales quotas. However, they can also take the form of unorthodox material renumeration, like discounts, gym memberships, or even stock options. Consider feeling out your team to help identify what would be the most effective motivator. Incentive schemes should be implemented carefully, though. This is because, in certain scenarios, they can promote unethical business practices among your employees, if they are overly driven to meet targets in order to obtain the incentives. Difficult to attain targets or meagre rewards will also likely only do so much for morale, and can even work to reduce their motivation in the long-run.
- Try Remote Team Building
Team building is a classic and established way of building social relationships and a sense of community among your employees, and has been used as a management technique for decades. However, traditional team building has been near-impossible to implement during the pandemic, when working from home has been a necessity for many of us. Fortunately, the team building industry, like many others, has adjusted to the current state of affairs. Many companies have developed software and concepts for team building that can be done remotely. These can range from platforms which allow puzzles to be completed collaboratively online, to companies like cityHUNT, who offer game show packages for your team to complete, tailored to their specific interests.
- Introduce Flexible Hours
Other than financial reward, the introduction of flexible hours is one of the other most common ways employers can increase worker motivation. This refers to allowing your employees some personal choice in the hours they work specifically. Some companies do this by operating a core hours policy, while others allow for total freedom in their employees’ choice of hours, providing they complete their contracted hours. This can be especially beneficial for your employees who have to deal with childcare while also working from home, as it allows for them to better manage both that and their work in conjunction with each other.
