You’re probably already well aware that your staff is the lifeblood of your business. They work diligently and consistently toward your collective success, they’re there to help you brainstorm new ideas, and get you through those dreaded creative slumps.
Unfortunately, the global pandemic has put a major strain on nearly every company’s staff force, and yours is likely included in the list. Your team members might still be feeling demotivated and burnt out after many months of working in isolation and being anxious about the future.
Your job as a business owner, team manager, or personal relations specialist is to provide the motivation your remote team needs to get through these dire times. You need to inspire them to stay productive while looking after themselves and prioritizing their own health and well-being.
Need a place to start? Here are our 3 essential tips for encouraging, motivating, and engaging your team to boost employee motivation and employee engagement.
1. Develop a Cross-Company Rewards System
Everyone loves rewards. They’re a fantastic source of motivation, along with an effective incentive to keep your team’s spirits high.
There are two main types of rewards you can use to motivate your team: intrinsic and extrinsic.
An intrinsic reward is an offering or gift with no tangible, physical presence, like a compliment or recognition for excellent contributions. Extrinsic rewards, on the other hand, are tangible items such as bonuses, trophies, plaques, or ‘Employee of the Month’ badges.
Both types of rewards can help to boost office morale and keep your staff motivated—but the true magic happens when you combine them. If you’re trying to figure out which type of reward would best suit your team, you need to take a closer look at the kinds of goals they’re aiming to achieve.
The Right Time for Intrinsic Rewards
Intrinsic rewards are best suited for acknowledging ‘immeasurable’ or subjective goals. They have a more powerful and longer-lived effect on your team’s attitude than extrinsic rewards do. If you plan on making a long-term positive impact on your team and encouraging certain actions or beliefs, intrinsic perks are your bet best.
There are so many ways to use this reward type to motivate your staff force. Recognizing their strengths, efforts, and achievements is quick, simple, cost-effective, and one of the best possible ways you can go about ensuring your staff remains loyal to your organization.
Intrinsic rewards can include employee of the month accolades, regular shout-outs, or even one-on-one meetings between employees and supervisors. In these meetings, contributions are praised and encouraged.
Regardless of how you reward your employees, remember to make sure your approach is inclusive and sensitive to their needs, expectations, and personal beliefs. Take time to figure out what inspires each of your workers so you can reward them in a way that engages and makes them feel appreciated and respected.
The Right Time for Extrinsic Rewards
You should ideally offer extrinsic rewards when there’s an obvious and measurable goal your team is trying to reach. You can use close monitoring and reporting to determine whether or not the team has hit its goal, and then reward them as you see fit.
It’s also recommended that you add a time frame to your extrinsic reward goals. This gives your team the incentives they need to work harder and quicker towards the objective at hand.
Moreover, it’s useful to create a hierarchy of company rewards. This allows you to offer predetermined rewards that match the amount of work your team puts in within a given time frame. If you give your staff force a major goal to achieve, make sure the prize is tempting enough to incentivize them to work towards it in good time.
You can offer smaller rewards, such as advanced paychecks, for workers achieving more minor goals. Even the simplest of offerings can motivate workers to accomplish easy feats like accurately reporting their hours, or submitting documents by specific deadlines.
Reserve larger, juicier rewards like gift cards and annual bonuses for notable achievements like boosting sales by a certain figure, or significantly improving production rates to a preset level. We recommend breaking down major goals into smaller objectives, each with its own small reward, for motivating employees and adding employee engagement throughout the process to keep team members on track.
2. Introduce Workplace Gamification
‘Gamification’ has become a huge buzzword in recent years. This movement has the power to motivate employees, students, online learners, and virtually everyone in between.
But what exactly IS gamification, and how does it fit into working from home?
Simply put, gamification is a method of motivation companies use to boost employee satisfaction, productivity, and employee efficiency. The method involves implementing game-based features into daily tasks to make work more fun and more immersive for all involved.
When you incorporate this element of competition into your company’s day-to-day operations, you can encourage your team to learn new skills rapidly, and apply them creatively in a fun work environment.
You can start adopting this approach by developing a training program packed with badges, rewards, leaderboards, and measured achievements for completing individual learning modules. You can even allow your staff members to compete with one another, or with different departments within your business. You can also use gamification and competition to motivate your departments individually, even when they’re working from home.
3. Offer Regular and Honest Feedback
It’s essential to give your employees regular and transparent feedback if you want to keep them motivated. Clear communication helps to build an awesome work-from-home culture that strengthens the team. Regardless of whether your feedback is positive, negative, or constructive, being honest will allow each of your workers to grow, both personally and professionally.
If you don’t provide enough feedback, your team members will never be sure of which aspects of their work ethic need attention, and which areas they’re performing exceptionally in.
Positive feedback is obviously the easiest type to offer. However, you need to make your compliments specific for them to really hit home. If you don’t, they may seem generic or insincere. Chat to your workers about specific actions and behaviors you appreciate, and explain exactly why they were the right choices to make.
It’s helpful to focus on how their actions benefit your company and align with its ethos. Once you explain your positive feedback at length to your team members, they’ll understand why it’s important for them to continue those actions in the future.
It can, of course, be harder to deliver negative feedback. As difficult as it is to accept, poor feedback can often be a more powerful motivator than upbeat praise. Using the ‘sandwich approach’ is the trick to turning negative feedback into a motivating force.
This approach involves offering a compliment, then criticism, then another compliment in that order. When you do broach your criticism, offer it in a neutral way, and use facts and a few specific incidents to back up your claims.
At the end of the day, you should keep your focus on your team member’s performance and the steps they can take to improve it. Give them time to offer their own feedback on your criticisms too. Doing so will allow your staff members a chance to voice their own thoughts and opinions and have them heard and validated.
The Bottom Line
It takes empathy and creativity in equal measures to motivate your team when they’re working from home. While remote work comes with some pros, it has its cons too. Your team could be battling with personal issues, anxious about the future, or suffering from workload-related stress. Remember to be kind and willing to listen to their concerns.
Thankfully, there are so many ways to increase employee motivation, even during trying times. Try using gamification, rewards systems, and honest feedback to engage your employees and boost their job satisfaction, every day of the week.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
In this blog post, Cloverleaf’s Chief Research Officer, Dr. Scott Dust, discusses cognitive diversity. He explains research findings from his published work in Personnel Psychology, offers key take-aways for maximizing cognitive diversity, and then explains how Cloverleaf can help facilitate the process of cognitive diversity.
In leadership and team building settings we’ve all been taught to embrace cognitive diversity. But how does cognitive diversity help? And how do we pinpoint and leverage cognitive diversity? My co-authors and I recently published a paper in Personnel Psychology that addresses these questions.
Across two studies, using a total of 520 manager-employee dyads, we found that manager-employee cognitive diversity improves employee creativity. As diverse teams become more divergent on risk orientation, employees’ intellectual stimulation increased, which in turn increased their creativity.
Risk orientation—the tendency to take or avoid risks when making decisions or problem-solving —is commonly thought to be a precursor to creativity. Importantly, it didn’t matter as much whether managers or employees were high or low on risk orientation. What did matter was that the manager and employee were different on risk orientation.
Also interesting is that employees’ perceptions of their managers determined whether the intellectual stimulation stemming from cognitive diversity was realized.
When employees’ perceived that their managers were genuinely interested in and open to their perspectives and ideas, the beneficial impact of cognitive diversity was enhanced. Alternatively, when employees’ perceived that their manager was uninterested in their perspectives and ideas, the benefits of cognitive diversity disappeared.
The take-aways of this research are three-fold:
(1) When two people work together that have a diversity of thought it facilitates intellectual stimulation, which entails rethinking assumptions and considering problems in new ways.
(2) When people experience intellectual stimulation it facilitates the generation of novel yet useful ideas and initiatives (i.e., creativity).
(3) The benefits of cognitive diversity in the work environment will only be realized when we perceive that the other party is genuinely open to our ideas and perspectives.
A key objective of the Cloverleaf platform is to enhance the likelihood that colleagues can capitalize on the benefits of cognitive diversity. To facilitate this process, we developed what is called the “Thinking Styles Comparison.”
On Cloverleaf’s team dashboard the user can select an assessment (e.g., DiSC, Instinctive Drives) and a team member comparison target. The user is then given a succinct report that helps them see how they can capitalize on their thinking style differences.
Cognitive diversity is important in work environments. At Cloverleaf, our goal is to help users make the most of these diverse viewpoints. Our hope is that this will lead to amazing teams that are not only more productive and make better decisions, but appreciate and respect each other’s different perspectives.
Liu, H., Dust, S. B., Xu, M., & Ji, Y. (forthcoming). Leader–follower risk orientation incongruence, intellectual stimulation, and creativity: A configurational approach. Personnel Psychology.
Reorganizations come in many forms, but the common element is that the change management required takes a toll on everyone. Whether it is flattening the organization for faster decision making, or a merger and acquisition that necessitates the integration of a common change management structure, the impact is real and can distract your people from daily operations. People are creatures of habit and disrupting the comfortable nature of their reporting and peer relationships with big organizational change can create anxiety and frustration for your teams.
It is natural for employees to be concerned about the impact these changes may have on career opportunities, the ability to contribute in a meaningful way, and job satisfaction.
And while most change management models are crafted with a lot of careful consideration, they tend to go wrong more often than not. According to McKinsey research, only 16% of merger reorgs fully deliver their objectives in the planned time, 41% take longer than expected, and in 10% of cases the reorg actually harms the newly-formed organization. Common pitfalls include a lack of cultural understanding between the integrating parties, poor integration leadership, and a focus on the wrong activity set or the wrong targets.
One study conducted by Bain & Company not only found that less than a third of reorg’s resulted in significant performance increases, but that some actually did just the opposite — the organizational change destroyed value.
Some of the more common reasons cited for these change management failures include:
Failure to think through what the critical initiatives are for the business, who should be responsible for them, and how the new structure will help people make and execute them better.
Misunderstanding the true strengths and weaknesses of the organization.
Missing key details of how the new organization will actually function.
Sticking to a flawed solution for too long.
While all of these and many more are key problems, I think there is another key aspect that impacts all of the above: the lack of tools available to really understand the impacts on key stakeholders while implementing change. As mentioned earlier, there is no lack of planning regarding these larger reorganizations. However, there is often not enough metrics available to help forecast the impact on people while leading change, and there are very few tools that give managers enough scenarios to manage successful change.
Team scenario planning tools
According to the authors of this recent Harvard Business Review article on merger reorganizations, “In developing organizational solutions, explicitly choosing from a number of options is the best approach. No solution will perfectly fit all future possibilities and every solution will have its downsides: only by weighing alternatives will you see what you might gain and what you might lose.”
But how do you choose from a host of alternatives if it is difficult or impossible to truly identify the potential options during a change management process?
This is where Cloverleaf comes in. Not only are you able to visualize the strengths and cultural dimensions of each organization but you can actually scenario plan the impact of combining, consolidating or re-shuffling the people inside organizations and teams.
Now – at least for culture, strengths and personality – you can know that you will go into the changes with eyes wide open.
Managing change is tough, and we may not be able to solve all of the detailed integration questions, but with Cloverleaf, you now have a powerful people planning tool to help you navigate organizational change management well. Contact us to find out more about our enterprise solutions or create a free account for your team.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
I was recently listening to season three of the Startup podcast which featured its founding company’s CEO Alex Blumberg working with an executive coach. The entire episode focused on Alex’s role in creating culture at Gimlet Media, the company responsible for the Startup podcast. This reminded me of a big question among those that study corporate culture. Does the CEO set the culture or is it created by the collection of individuals that belong to the organization?
There are obvious great examples of CEO’s that have left an indelible mark on their company’s culture. Typically these have been founder CEOs or successful bosses that have had extremely long tenures at their respective businesses. People like Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs come immediately to mind.
But ultimately who has the greater impact and if you want to truly impact culture do you start at the top or the bottom? According to Harvard Business Review article entitled “You Can’t Dictate Culture – But You Can Influence It”, it is a little of both but ultimately it is the people that create culture.
Even after thousands of years of civilization, leaders still have trouble getting everyone to follow any basic precepts of behavior (think the Ten Commandments). In other words, culture is not a “goal” to be mandated, but the outcome of a collective set of behaviors.
This shouldn’t ignore the role of culture influencers but each individual that comes into an organization has an opportunity to shift and shape the organizational culture – for better or worse.
At Cloverleaf our hypothesis is that culture isn’t created at the top – rather can be dictated by the aggregation of individual cultural preferences of the people that work everyday in your culture.
So what if you could measure the influence of each individual in your organization, define your cultural objectives and put people together in teams that create the clear culture you hope to reinforce?
Now you can. It actually costs you nothing to get started – just invite your team to create a Cloverleaf account and provide a few pieces of data. We aggregate their data on proficiency, personality and preferences and give you a clear view of your existing culture and with our visualizations the way forward is clear.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
“Employee brand” and “recruitment brand” are major buzzwords these past few years. Which means a lot of new technologies have popped up to create beautiful websites selling your internal brand to potential employees.
And that’s the problem. These websites exist to SELL workplace brands — touting all of the best things and none of the real day-to-day things. Workers today, especially millennials and GenXers, crave authenticity. We can smell a sales pitch a mile away.
We were trained this way. Our schools now spend weeks teaching students how to see through marketing and sales pitches in order to pursue the truth. So of course workers are skeptical when presented with marketing or sales pitches — they want to know what the workplace is REALLY like.
Is the manager a jerk? How flexible will my hours really be? Will I be guilted into working over the weekend if I ever have a prayer of advancing in this organization? These are the questions we want answers to and no amount of happy videos and beautiful pictures of break rooms and ping pong tables are ever going to give us those answers.
In fact, these are factors that aren’t easily quantified. The schedule flexibility that you crave may not be the environment that I want. The culture in IT is different than the culture in the call center – which makes a one size fits all approach challenging. So what is an employer to do?
Why not start with measuring your culture? Sure, this is no new suggestion. Internal culture surveys have been used widely — but after the results are generated, are they actually useful long term? We hear they often collect dust on the shelf.
This is why we built Cloverleaf — to help you measure your culture in an actionable way. As in, you can use the results to communicate your day-to-day culture in your employee brand, and visualize how new hires will fit in the team.
We believe culture is created by the collection of individuals that make up a team. And a company is then a collection of these different teams. So it might help to start small – perhaps with that difficult department that has high turnover or is constantly looking for that difficult technical skill set that is impossible to recruit for.
Then you can aggregate to entire divisions or Fortune 100 companies. Along the way you have the power to create teams and gain a better understanding of the unique cultures represented by these teams. And the best part as a talent acquisition specialist is that you can use that team to build the basis for your recruiting efforts. Attach the job listing to the team dashboard and see how the applicants fit in.