How to Keep Your Employees Motivated

This week’s post is especially intended for entrepreneurs, small business owners and managers. Every business owner and manager knows that motivated employees are more productive and also, they do more quality work. Therefore, you need to keep your employees motivated and make them feel excited to come to work every day.

There are many ways to keep your employees happy and motivated without raising their pay. Below you can find some of them:

  • Create a Pleasant Work Environment: Make sure the office looks nice cosmetically. Having plants around the office will increase positive feelings as well as help reduce stress, lower blood pressure, noise level and humidity. Also, neutral tones and earth tones are the best for an office because these colors are calming and warm. In addition, a softer light is much better than fluorescent lighting.
  • Recognize the Achievements of Your Employees: When your employees accomplish their goals or achieve something, take the time to appreciate them. Write an email or a personal thank you note for their accomplishments and you can even give them a small gift like a gift card or tickets to a sports game. If a team achieves something, you can reward them with a nice lunch.
  • Coach Your Employees: Feedback is great for motivating your employees. Nobody likes to be micro-managed. Instead they prefer someone who will motivate them and lead them towards a goal. If you notice that the performance of one of your employees is weaker than others, give him/her constructive feedback so s/he can also improve her/himself. Let your employees know that you care for them.
  • Encourage Training: Encourage your employees to learn new skills and go to training sessions. Motivate them to get professional certifications that will be helpful for their job.
  • Be Clear in Your Communication: You always have to be transparent when communicating with your employees. Even if the news are bad, you should still clearly talk with your employees and explain them what is going on within the company. Create time to listen to your employees’ concerns and do your best to solve them. Keep an open channel of communication and get their feedback when necessary.
  • Casual Fridays: If your company has a dress code for business, making Fridays a casual dress day will boost your employees’ morale and motivate them. You can use holidays to create theme days as well. For example, you can ask your employees to wear something orange on Halloween or green on St.Patrick’s Day. This will let them feel the spirit as well as create a more positive work environment.
Picture of Ceren Cubukcu

Ceren Cubukcu

Ceren Cubukcu is a top 5 bestselling author of Make Your American Dream A Reality: How to Find a Job as an International Student in the United States. She recently founded her consulting business to help more international students find jobs in the US in addition to her self-service digital event ticketing platform, Etkinlik Fabrikam (My Event Factory), to offer her webinars. 

TRENDING AROUND THE WEB

Many adult children remember watching a father work sixty-hour weeks for decades so the family could have what he never did, then watched him die in his sixties without ever prioritizing his own happiness, and now see that same pattern quietly repeating in their own lives, under a different name.

Many adult children remember watching a father work sixty-hour weeks for decades so the family could have what he never did, then watched him die in his sixties without ever prioritizing his own happiness, and now see that same pattern quietly repeating in their own lives, under a different name.

Global English Editing

Eye tracking research on how people actually read web pages found that most visitors scan in a rough F shaped pattern down the left side of the screen, which is why professional editors front load the real information instead of slowly building up to it

Eye tracking research on how people actually read web pages found that most visitors scan in a rough F shaped pattern down the left side of the screen, which is why professional editors front load the real information instead of slowly building up to it

The Blog Herald

Harvard researchers had 166 undergraduates rate their own pets on qualities like thoughtful, considerate and sympathetic, and the students who felt most chronically disconnected from other people scored their pets meaningfully higher on exactly those three traits, and no others.

Harvard researchers had 166 undergraduates rate their own pets on qualities like thoughtful, considerate and sympathetic, and the students who felt most chronically disconnected from other people scored their pets meaningfully higher on exactly those three traits, and no others.

Global English Editing

A large-scale field study using real-world healthcare data found no measurable evidence that medical professionals make worse decisions as their workday wears on, directly contradicting one of the most frequently repeated claims in modern popular psychology writing

A large-scale field study using real-world healthcare data found no measurable evidence that medical professionals make worse decisions as their workday wears on, directly contradicting one of the most frequently repeated claims in modern popular psychology writing

The Blog Herald

University of Arizona researchers wired 79 people with a recorder sampling conversations every 12.5 minutes for four days and found the happiest had twice as many substantive conversations and a third as much small talk as the unhappiest, suggesting the discomfort was never a social deficit.

University of Arizona researchers wired 79 people with a recorder sampling conversations every 12.5 minutes for four days and found the happiest had twice as many substantive conversations and a third as much small talk as the unhappiest, suggesting the discomfort was never a social deficit.

Global English Editing

A landmark study found that Catholic nuns who wrote sparse, simple autobiographies in their early twenties, when they entered the convent in the 1930s, were far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease roughly six decades later, with about 80 percent of the low-complexity writers eventually developing the disease compared to only 10 percent of those whose youthful essays were dense with ideas

A landmark study found that Catholic nuns who wrote sparse, simple autobiographies in their early twenties, when they entered the convent in the 1930s, were far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease roughly six decades later, with about 80 percent of the low-complexity writers eventually developing the disease compared to only 10 percent of those whose youthful essays were dense with ideas

Global English Editing