Anyone can perform a task at work knowing the end result is a salary. However, passion and hard work often stems from affirmations employees hear from their boss or manager. Employees don’t just crave a paycheck — they want recognition, verbal appreciation and encouragement. Great leaders help employees grow via performance motivation, recognition and feedback.
Related article: How to Experience Optimal Outcomes from Your Team
Engaged, empowered and appreciated employees will bring their A game every single day. Here are three powerful and proven ways to ensure this result:
1. Performance Motivation
Use tools to create an environment of internal and external motivation. Performance motivation allows team members to understand their role, believe they are making a difference in their company. They will experience safety, belonging and mattering.
2. Appreciation, Celebration
Celebrating successes on a regular basis through visible appreciation (high five emails to the team, weekly round-up emails listing individual employee’s wins, leaderboards showing employees who are achieving their needle movers, Friday celebration on what the team accomplished this week, etc.).
3. Feedback
Creating an environment where employees feel safe to offer feedback and to receive feedback on an ongoing basis.
How are you creating a culture where your employees are motivated to grow both externally and internally?
Help Them Feel Powerful Via Emotional Resilience
To create an environment where team members feel powerful, effective, enrolled and engaged requires leaders to manage their emotional state and show others how to too.
Emotional resilience is the ability to deal with the toughest, most challenging situations. It’s being able to bounce back even when you fail big. Emotional resilience is the one thing that will ensure you navigate through situations where others would give up. There are four steps:
- Figure out what you’re feeling
- Take a breather
- Consider the recipient
- Focus on the outcome
When we create an environment where employees create behaviour patterns that come from emotional empowerment and choice, rather than from compulsive reaction, we are helping them feel good about who they are. This is achieved through re-structuring the Trigger, Routine, Reward sequence of a behaviour. Thrive Change Management have programs using neuroscience to install this in employees.
Help Them Have Fun
What makes a company culture vibrant where employees feel appreciated? The element of fun.
Most of our clients either have or are in the process of launching recognition programs where any employee can appreciate and acknowledge the contribution of another. These work best when the acknowledgement is about modelling a company value. Others hold mini-golf tournaments in the middle of the office where each hole celebrates a company goal or value. Others have story time where leaders tell stories of triumphs—both personal and professional—that they have overcome and how.
There are countless ways to have fun and even attach empowering meaning to it at the same time.
Help Them Have Trust
Trust is key for employees to be engaged. Lack of trust creates an environment where concerns quickly evolve into fears. And when fears collide with a belief that the system is failing, trouble results. Also as distrust and fear increase, the negative impact on employee morale, engagement and performance accelerate. When we create environments where trust is prevalent, employees will feel like their voice is heard and that they are appreciated.
There are three levels of trust that an employee must feel sustainability:
- Trust in their team: Are there bullies in your organization?
- Trust in their company: Consider your organization’s capability, commitment, and character. How are you doing?
- Trust in their leader: Trust starts at the top where the culture of the organization is formed–leaders must build a solid foundation where employee trust and engagement can thrive.
In our Culture Development Program we cover all the psychological safety factors to make your company thrive. Contact us for more information or email: jake@thrive-cm.com
First published on Forbes.com
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