Look After your Employees to Motivate Them
Are you working from home? Are you keeping to your normal work routine, getting up early, getting dressed up, hair and make up done and logging on at 9am with your cup of coffee? If so, I’d love to hear what motivates you. What keeps you going?
In the Last Blog we looked at Employee Benefits with specific emphasis on these difficult times. I’m hearing more and more stories of friends and family being furloughed, put on enforced leave, unpaid leave and the threat of redundancy. Others are working at home and haven’t had to put their work suits on for well over a month. Being at home without human contact, face to face, can have an isolating effect despite spending time in virtual meetings; threatening mental health and perhaps work productivity.
Employees are starting to hear of decisions being made without them and email communications informing them of a.k.a dictating important changes in the company. As a manager it is incredibly difficult to keep all of your employees in the loop all of the time, but when your team is highly dispersed it can be tempting to make decisions without getting them all together to be involved in the decision making process. This is one of the biggest threats to Employee Motivation – if you are not careful your teams will become more and more distant making the return to work more difficult at a time when you need to keep productivity high.
The good news stories of employees being embraced by liberal employers as they sit at home in their workout clothes, with children playing in the background and a cat on their laps are few and far between in the grand scheme of things. Wouldn’t you like to be that manager though? The one who genuinely enjoys seeing inside their employees’ homes; the ones who genuinely enjoys meeting their children and chatting with them too? The one who sends a care package for those who can’t get to a supermarket? At a time like this, getting personal is probably one of the most important things you can do for your teams. Be there for them, understand the challenges they face, ask them if they are ok. The chances are they are worrying a great deal about themselves, their families and loved ones and perhaps the future in general. Keep them ‘engaged’ in this way. Mirroring the last blog, it is really important that you take this time to ‘look after’ your employees now or face losing them in the aftermath of all this.
According to Gallup:
Only 2 in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.
30% of employees strongly agree that their manager involves them in goal setting.
Employees whose managers involve them in goal setting are 3.6x more likely than other employees to be engaged.
26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them to do their work better.
As you can see from the Forbes table above there are many things you can do to ensure you think about both your Millenials and Gen Z. Genuineness, honesty, transparency and a coaching manager amongst the most pertinent of items on this list.
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