Strategies for Motivating Your Technical Team
It is no secret that your company will not be one if your employees decided to stop being productive. You might still get an output if they decided to do just the minimal but ‘an output’ can’t just be your goal. Your goal is to make your company stand out from the million others who are into the same field. For this to happen, you need your employees to give their full to the company and produce exceptional results. Now for them to do all that, you need to give them reasons to, motivation being one of them. With the right kind of rapport and motivation, your employees will deliver what you want them to and hence ensure improved retention, better returns on human capital and high-quality work output.
Measuring Motivation and Knowing Where You Stand
Now that you know that motivation is key in attaining good results, you need to know if the ways of motivation you practice is working or not. One way to know that is to check on employee engagement. Employees who are well motivated tend to be engaged in their work for longer hours. Reports suggest that 7 in 10 employees are usually not engaged. If all the output you are receiving right now if from the maximum hard work from 30% of your employees and just minimal from 70%, imagine the output you could receive if all of them gave their fullest.
Hiring them for your company aside, who do you think will be your client/consumer/customer now and in the near future? That’s right, it is the millennials. And who better to deliver to their needs than one of them, who is working for you.
The Real Challenge: Understanding How to Motivate Technical Team Members
Motivating your employees is easier said than done. When you realize that all human beings are different and something that motivates one person might do just the opposite to another, you realize the kind of effort and work one should put into this whole issue.
Unlike computers and systems, you cannot always get a very specific result from a human being by behaving the same way to all of them. It is a real challenge to personalize the kind of motivation methods according to how each and every member of your company works. Here are some ways to do that.
Strategy #1 – Measure Ongoing Progress and Consistently Offer New Challenges
There is a fine line between having uniformity in the job you do and moving towards monotony. Every employee like walking that fine line. Move to one side of it and you will no longer know what exactly your job is as you will be doing various kinds of work every day; move to the other side and voila, you will be leading a stagnant monotonous life. Putting across challenges every now and then will help them feel a renewed sense of purpose while moving away from monotonous boredom but not so much that they actually deviate from their field of work. What works to break off the monotony is to break down work and great groups with individual heads, give them a platform routinely to share the progress in their group, and gain confidence with the acknowledgement of others as well as be motivated by others’ progress.
Strategy #2 – Make the Path for Growth Clear and Let Overachievers Overachieve
Mere motivation will not ensure an employee’s tenure in your company. It is extremely frustrating for a well-motivated employee to do everything he/she can but get nowhere with it. It is fine if the company has decided certain parameters and targets for them to move to a higher position or be worthy of an advantage. However, it is the duty of the employer to make sure that those targets are made clear and transparent to the employee so that they know when to expect growth in the field. If not, you might just lose some of your extremely motivated and hardworking personnel.
One of the things you can do apart from motivation is to create an environment that focuses on encouraging them to develop themselves in a broader sense even though all you want is a fitting output from them.
Strategy #3 – Create Like-Minded Teams
An easy way for you to do the whole motivation session is to categories like-minded in terms of the credits they expect like finance or personal growth. This way, you can motivate them according to their interest rather than leaving a part of the team unmotivated and the rest inspired.
When you decide to motivate people according to the field of work they are in and not considering what personal benefits they are looking for, what happens is while you might motivate a few, you might also demotivate the rest because they will end up assuming that that is the only benefit they are going to receive and that the company is not their cup of tea.
Grouping can be tricky. It is very critical to consider motivation and goals irrespective of the department or specific work they do. Mixing motivation can prove to be tragic in the output. Motivations can vary from person to person. Just because a person is motivated by finance does not make them a bad person as long as their approach and attitude gels well with the rest of the team.