Best practices to build and retain a motivated team
Possibly the hardest thing in business is to build a motivated team. Retaining their motivation in the long run is a whole different level of difficult. There are however some best practices that will help you to achieve this seemingly unattainable goal.
Recruit the right people
Duh! I know, but this is much easier said than done. Bringing the right people on board requires a huge amount of self awareness on your part. You have to be very clear on what your company’s purpose is, what are the values it stands for and the type of culture you want to nourish. Without clarity about these you have to be extremely lucky to recruit the right people with the right mentality and attitude. And let me tell you who have seen over a hundred employees come and go during my entrepreneurial career, you won’t get that lucky.
“Clarity about your company values and long term goals will help you to find the right people.”
You have to find people who are a good fit not only because they have the right skills and the right type of knowledge, but because they also have the right soft skills in place. You can always teach someone how to use a drill, but you can not change people’s personalities and their attitude towards life. So have a recruitment process in place that filters out the talents with the right soft skills.
Listen to them
And I mean LISTEN! Actively. Don’t just pretend that you are listening to their input and feedback. Pay attention to what they are saying, don’t think about your answer while they are talking to you, pay full attention. Listen to how they are saying what they are saying, what words they are using, what their tone is, what their body language is like.
Need help with your team?
Once you have listened and only then, think about your response. If you need time to think about your response, ask for a moment and think about it. If anything that will show respect toward their opinion, it will show that you are truly considering what you’ve just heard.
Last but not least, you and all your leaders should speak their mind last. Once you have spoken your mind on a topic you have already tainted what you are going to hear. Even without you saying a thing it is probably already a filtered version of what they really have on their minds.
They are your most important customers
Although you are the one paying them a salary to do a particular job, you always have to keep in mind that you get something valuable in return. You get control over how they use their knowledge and how they spend their most valuable resource: time.
Me and my clueQuest team in 2018
At the end of the day, your team members are the ones who create and deliver your products to your customers. If they are not happy doing what they do day in and day out, they won't have the mental capacity to make your customers happy.
Think about how working for your company helps them achieve their personal goals and dreams. If you support them to grow and achieve more in life they will do the same in return.
Encourage mistakes
People who don’t make mistakes, never tried in the first place. Mistakes happen and that’s okay. The only important rule to keep in mind that you have to learn from your mistakes and avoid doing them the next time. If people are afraid of retaliation because of a mistake, they will never try in the first place. Or they will simply keep you in the dark about it and you’ll only find out from customer reviews.
The “ability” to make mistakes should always be a company wide privilege. Everyone should be allowed to make mistakes, otherwise a gap between the people who are allowed and the ones who aren’t will appear and grow over time.
When it’s time to let go, let go
There is nothing worse that can happen to your team’s motivation than someone who has turned sour. People who have lost motivation are the ones who will make sure that others lose it too. No one likes to be miserable alone.
“One of the leading causes of employee disengagement is too much gap between structure and reality.”
Find out why this happened in the first place, investigate, chat to people, do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of it. It might be a recent change that they didn’t like, it might be too much gap between structure and reality or it might be simply a change in their personal circumstances. Whichever it is, get to the bottom of it and try to help the person in question within reason. But if they’ve reached the point of no return, kindly but firmly remind them that no one stops them from finding a new employer that fits them better.
This is a shared experience
Remind your team that you are in this together, this is a shared experience and there will always be problems. The important thing is that people need the willingness to be part of the process and not just demand a solution on a silver plate. The ones who do are the ones that you should consider saying goodbye to.
Build & retain a motivated team
Remember that your team and their motivation levels are never set in stone. These things change over time so don’t be discouraged if the team is going through a motivational dip, just make sure you stick to these rules.
