Find a personal motivator and goal for everyone
People are driven by different interests and needs. Some people want stable, understandable tasks, while others want to try as many new things as possible. Some people strive for public recognition, while for others being in the spotlight is not so important.
Try not to project your own preferences onto your colleagues and select a separate incentive for each.
Tatyana Morozova, leading HR specialist at EPAM Gomel : “When choosing a motivator for an employee, you need to take into account his mentality, psychotype, emotional state, position in the company and society.
In addition, it is important to understand that the same stimulus cannot work for a person all the time. Motivators change over time, as family or social status, tasks, and position change.”
To track changes and understand what is most important for an employee now, communicate regularly, and hold a large 1-1 meeting every six months to a year. The following questions will help lead you to the topic:
Let's sum it up
It should be remembered that both external factors and the internal mood of the person himself can encourage action. For each person, motivation is individual, so his essence itself determines the source of motivation. Please note that an indecisive person needs an external stimulus, while an ambitious person is helped by his internal potential.
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Promote professional growth
The desire for growth is a universal incentive. Try to show your employees prospects: the opportunity to receive more complex tasks, a new project, position, salary increase. When a person understands where he is going and what he can count on in the future, his motivation grows.
If necessary, help develop a personal development plan, recommend a training program, literature and other resources.
Pavel Belsky, team lead of the EPAM Belarus development team : “Robert Greenleaf introduced the concept of a servant leader - a team lead who helps people grow and solve problems. I agree that this is how a manager should treat employees. But at the same time, it is important to help people where they really need it. If you have an experienced employee on your team, be his senior comrade and try to interfere less often. Be a mentor for beginners: help them cope with problems, draw up a development plan.”
Method No. 8
Keep a diary. This will help organize your actions, and you will clearly see your results. You write a to-do list for the day, put a square in front of it, and shade these squares as you complete them. What you couldn’t do today, put it off until tomorrow. At the end of the week, you analyze how many things you managed to do, what worked, what didn’t work. Next, compare the weeks.
You won’t believe it, but a large number of shaded squares will increase your importance in their eyes and give you new strength. The main thing is to regularly add to the list and cross off what you have accomplished.
Provide the necessary resources
Svetlana Bodrenkova, soft skills trainer and HR manager at EPAM Vilnius : “As a mentor of young managers, I notice that the provision of resources “suffers” most often. Let’s say a manager has agreed with an employee that he will improve his spoken English from A2 to B1 in two months. It is beneficial for the employee (the choice of future projects will expand), and it meets the company’s goals. What about resources?
An experienced English teacher will tell you that moving to the next level requires about 60 academic hours of study, plus homework, plus repetition and work on mistakes. Does the employee have the opportunity to find this time over the next 3 months? Is the manager, for his part, ready to bother about changing the design load?
Method No. 3
My favorite example is positive motivation. I recommend using it with any application like pomidoro. You install it on your smartphone, set a timer, for example twenty-five minutes, and devote all this time to continuous work. Upon completion, for productive time spent and results, reward yourself with a cup of coffee, a ten-minute walk, or any other activity that pleases you. After five to ten minutes, set the timer again. We promise ourselves that we will spend the next twenty-five minutes working on some task. In this way, we enthusiastically work on routine tasks all day, stopping every twenty-five to thirty minutes for small pleasant breaks. This is the most productive method in my opinion.
Get rid of demotivators
Managers, without noticing it themselves, can make mistakes that seriously undermine an employee’s motivation. Here are the most common demotivators:
Monotony, routine . Any job, even the most beloved one, can become boring over time. Try to give employees a variety of tasks, offer tasks “with an asterisk”, the next level of complexity. If there is no such opportunity right now, agree with the employee that the routine is a temporary necessity, and in the future you will find something more interesting and developing.
Misunderstanding of goals and objectives . If an employee does not know what result is expected of him and what it is needed for, and the scope of work is blurred, he will work carelessly. Set clear tasks and goals, take the time to explain what, why, how and why.
Overload . When a person is given too many tasks or almost all of them are urgent, motivation drops, and in the worst case, burnout occurs. Try to distribute the workload evenly between team members and set adequate deadlines.
Too much control and criticism . Excessive claims and the “you’re doing everything wrong” approach also reduce motivation. A manager is not a supervisor. Try not to find fault or impose your point of view. Instead, give correct feedback. The “sandwich” method is suitable: what turned out well? What's bad and why? How could you have done it differently? Can I help you?
Emotional swing . The constant change of mood of the manager disorients the employee and does not allow him to concentrate on doing a good job and developing. Instead, a person is constantly forced to think about why the same actions lead to completely different reactions.
Feeling of injustice . There are a lot of options: an employee often hears threats, he is publicly scolded, he is given tasks “for the secretary,” and so on.
Motivation: a magic wand for skillful hands
Motivation is a magic wand for skillful hands.
Motivation can be different: individual and collective, positive and negative, in the form of specific encouragements and simple but relevant words at a certain moment.
The simplest form of motivation is words. Yes, yes, with the help of an ordinary request or a well-constructed monologue you can achieve the seemingly impossible! “Son, please put on your hat, otherwise we’ll have to go bowling on Saturday without you, you might get sick,” are the usual words of an ordinary mother who is worried about the health of a teenager. But instead of saying in an orderly tone, “Don’t go out without a hat!”, the mother emphasized that her son would lose time at the bowling club if he got sick. The schoolboy will certainly no longer rely on “maybe” and go without a hat!
Sometimes, for your own motivation, in order to believe in your strength, it is enough to look through quotes from great people or watch a film about success: the dialogues of actors in such films are pure motivation! Thus, using someone else’s successful example, we develop a desire to become better, more successful, to achieve goals using all possible methods.
It is worth choosing motivating words, as a rule, depending on the specifics of the situation and your place in it. If you are the wife of a man who needs a little emotional boost, all you can do is sincerely emphasize his inner core and your love for him, regardless of the weather in the house. If you are a boss and you need to motivate your staff, the matter will not be limited to “love”; you need a more pragmatic approach (words that emphasize the importance of each individual employee, and promises that will open up any prospects).
But still, in the case of a team, a more rational method of motivation is methods of organizational influence. These methods include:
- orders within the company;
- official notes;
- orders and management commands;
- administrative decisions of managers.
Give more freedom and the right to make mistakes
Sergei Boyko, director of the EPAM Belarus department : “It is very important that people somewhere act in accordance with general instructions (such situations should be specified immediately), and somewhere they show initiative and autonomy: generate ideas and make decisions. But this is only possible when the employee clearly understands where he and the entire team are heading, when there is a common goal.
It is equally important that people know how to take responsibility for decisions made. To do this, they must know that they can make mistakes and there will be no punishment for it. There will only be a result that we would not like to see, and the understanding that this is a consequence of your own decisions.”
How to motivate people to act.
How to motivate people
Motivation is the main “driving force” of any endeavor, be it the desire to buy a bun or earn another million.
In the first case, the basis of motivation is a feeling of hunger, in the second - a feeling of self-worth, the desire to buy a salon for this million for the wife, the desire to “outdo” a competitor, etc. If in the first case everything is simple and clear (there is a need - there is motivation - there is action), then in the second case there can be a huge number of motivating factors: the more complex the goal, the more effort and... justification for yourself about the appropriateness of a specific goal is required!
How to change your behavior strategy
Many articles about personal growth say that you need to suppress negative emotions and overcome all obstacles in your path. This way of thinking is so common because, psychologically speaking, it is much easier to overcome than to admit defeat. If you suppress negative emotions, you will not reconsider your behavior strategies and priorities. If you want to achieve your goals, perhaps you need to stop fussing and think carefully about your strategy.
6. Challenge yourself to new challenges. A reward is not motivating if it is not related to the area in which a person would like to succeed. A scientist will not feel more successful as a scientist if he is recognized as the world's best surf coach. Liesl writes that “sometimes people become depressed because life no longer requires them to do their best. Working half-heartedly saves energy, but sometimes it can cause harm.” Take on a new project at work or find a side project outside of work - challenge yourself.
7. Look for ways to improve your strategy. If you are not satisfied with the results achieved, take time to think about why this is happening and what to do about it. It may turn out that you are working on the right project, took advantage of the right opportunity, but the chosen method is not the best. Let's say your blog is not growing as quickly as you would like. Perhaps you should learn SEO promotion, start advertising your blog on Facebook, or change the format: write less often, but work on articles better.
8. Explore new opportunities. You can't look into the future: that's why we often misjudge opportunities. Sometimes it is not enough to change your attitude towards the situation and your behavior strategy. In such cases, try choosing a different target. Yes, realizing that you failed can damage your self-esteem. However, it is foolish to deny the reality: you have not achieved what you wanted. Think about your strengths and weaknesses, consider your values, and set new goals for yourself.
Method number 9
Designed for leaders. Organize competitions for your employees. Just please, don’t promise one prize for everyone, be more inventive. Otherwise, instead of playing a motivational game to improve the performance of your department, you will turn it into a swarm of snakes. Emphasize that even if they lose, the participants will gain interesting experience; if this is a sales department, the salary for the period of the game will be higher in any case. Be smart, get your employees interested, make them feel like a team.
