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How to Keep your Employees Motivated

By Hugh Fort in News Stories, posted November 28, 2022

Businesses use a whole range of metrics to establish how well they’re performing in the long term. But as well as cash flow, profit and loss, and other more easily-quantified data, it’s worth considering employee happiness.

As well as being an inherently worthy consideration, monitoring employee happiness might help to reveal underlying problems in your business. It might be that employees are unhappy for a particular reason, which can be addressed.

Unhappy workers tend to be less productive, and more likely to leave the company in search of a more satisfying position elsewhere. Thus, it’s critical that employers take the problem of employee unhappiness seriously.

How to keep employees motivated

Let’s consider a few different strategies for keeping employees happy.

A healthy office environment

Here, we’re not just talking about the culture of the workplace (though that’s important), but the physical space they’ll be inhabiting for much of their working day. Equip the office with houseplants, and make sure that there’s plenty of natural light distributed throughout.

Regular breaks

When employees are working flat-out during every available hour, they’ll quickly burn out. This will lead to a downturn in productivity, which might have been avoided by mandating regular, short breaks.

Recognition

Often, what employees crave most is for their efforts to be recognised. You might do this publicly by singling an employee out for praise at a meeting. This helps to send the message that hard work isn’t going unnoticed. Since this is something that costs very little, it’s well worth doing.

Work-life balance

Modern employees tend to crave flexibility, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Hybrid working environments are increasingly sought-after, and so, provided that it’s appropriate in your workplace, offering this kind of arrangement might be hugely beneficial.

Make them feel safe

If your employees feel as though their safety is being endangered every time they come into work, they’ll end up suffering from chronic stress. All businesses in the UK owe a legal duty of care to their employees, and so taking appropriate measures to improve safety might help you to avoid legal action, as well as limiting absenteeism and losses in productivity.

For example, you might provide personal protective equipment, like safety shoes, to workers in hazardous environments.

Rewards and perks

There are non-financial incentives you might offer to bolster employee morale. Company cars, computers, and tablets might all make life that little bit more pleasant.

No micromanaging

While directing an employee through every detail of their job might seem like a great way to maintain control over the entire organisation, it can stunt that employee’s ability to make their own judgements, and hamper their overall job satisfaction. Where micromanagement is a problem, there might be broader cultural factors at play in the workplace – so make sure that you have a frank conversation with any affected employees, so that you can make the appropriate changes.