A Proven Formula for Boosting Your Team’s Motivation

 By: Jolly Rajan

When you're the leader of a motivated team, your job becomes much more fulfilling. Members who care about their work will be adaptable and innovative when pushed to new limits by a supportive and transformative leader like yourself!

However, this may not be an easy task. According to a recent Gallup report, 51% of employees are disengaged at work, and 13% are actively disengaged.

The difficulty may be greater when you add in the brand-new needs of remote and also hybrid teams. For example, a recent study cited by the Harvard Business Review found motivation dropped 17% when employees had little choice in where they worked.

What can you do to inspire more engagement and keep morale high?

Try these tested methods for boosting your team’s motivation.

How to Boost Intrinsic Motivation

The most powerful motivation to do well comes from within. You can create an environment that will support your team's goals and help them grow by creating a climate where people are motivated by their own success, not just how much you value their contributions or what the company wants out of each person.  You can help cultivate a growth mindset  by celebrating failure and encouraging a continuous improvement mindset to learn from failure.  

Help your team improve their motivation with these strategies:

1. Clarify your purpose. As a leader, it is crucial that you help your team understand the why behind their work. By doing this they are more likely to be invested in making an impact and achieving results for each other! Set concrete goals and help your team chart a path to achieve them.  
   
   
2. Facilitate reflection. How do you share feedback with your team? How frequently do you provide opportunities for your team to reflect on their success and challenges?  Ask open-ended questions and listen to their responses. If you're an Agile Team Leader, this goes beyond the Retrospective as you'll be building relationships with the people on your team.  
   
   
3. Cultivate an Experimentation Mindset. A company that believes in failure is one with an open culture. It's not just a figure of speech, it reflects your values and beliefs; support this by rewarding individuals for taking risks!
   
   
4. Support Decision-Makers! This takes more than lip service and requires true empowerment of your team to make decisions based on their skill and content authority. Next, demonstrate that you value your employees' skills and abilities by deferring to them to make decisions they have the knowledge to make. And finally, being a micro-manager never got anyone anywhere; let your team take responsibility for how they accomplish their work.
   
   
5. The "R" in SMART Goals!  Be realistic about your goals and how they impact your team. Ensure that you have their buy-in and support in what you're trying to accomplish
   
   
6. Develop Relationships Meet with your employees regularly. These sessions can be viewed as a way for you to develop your internal coaching style as a leader and help address any issues, feedback, career development. Conduct these in a way that stresses the individual's innate ability to self-diagnose and improve their performance. They don't need you to tell them what to do! They need you to listen and ask powerful questions. They also need you to help them set realistic goals for themselves.  

How to Boost Extrinsic Motivation

Ultimately, people are motivated by factors such as money, title, rewards, etc. So what are some of the ways to ensure you balance intrinsic with extrinsic? Read on...

Some techniques to keep in mind:

1. Make work a game! How can you make work feel more like play? Look for ways to gamify or increase competition within and outside the team.  
   
   
2. Team events. Go beyond the typical birthday events and think outside the box for ideas to motivate your team. Maybe include team building events, celebrations for a challenging project milestone, or other incentive-based rewards.
   
   
3. Gifts and Prizes Surprise employees with gifts for the winter, team t-shirts with customized logos, etc. The little stuff counts!
   
   
4. Provide a clear path to advancement. Most important to employees is that they feel valued today and have a clear path on how they can keep growing. Make sure you help them reach their full potential and keep them informed of any tuition reimbursement programs or other assistance the organization provides
   
   
5. Change it up! Organize external speakers to speak on something of relevance or importance to the team. Or maybe even an internal conference just for your company! Providing avenues like this for growth and learning can be a powerful motivator!
   
   
6. Create an Environment for Learning. Where you work matters! If you're all back in the office, balance public and private workspaces. If you have the means, balance work areas with plenty of natural light and let your employees decorate their workspaces. If remote or hybrid, invest in collaboration tools that allow people to express themselves.
   
   
7. If in doubt, ask! Take the guesswork out of it and ask your employees what they want. Post surveys online or request a show of hands to vote on different options.

 It takes effort to shape a group of employees into a powerful team, but the results are worth it. A motivated and engaged workforce will certainly benefit from greater autonomy and help you reach your business goals.

What do you think about these strategies? Let us know in the comments below.