Tips to Help Motivate Your Team

When you’re the owner of a small business, it is your responsibility to keep the team motivated and united.  Long hard days of the same old routine can become tedious, leaving team members feeling uninspired. When your superstar team isn’t feeling their best this is going to have an impact on the quality of work. By keeping every member of the team motivated every day will make for a much better working environment.  You may understand it’s important but feel like you don’t have enough time to be doing it. WRONG. It is vital that you make the time, as you simply can’t afford not to. Never fear, it’s much easier than you think. Check out these simple tips to help motivate your small business team.

1.      Communicate with your team

Communication with yourself and your team is key to running a successful business. Openly communicating in your business allows everyone to share their goals with one another, so everyone knows where they stand. It also allows you to provide an update of upcoming sales. Also, through open communication in the business you can make sure your employees know exactly what impact they are having on the success of the company. This will help create a positive environment without any negative disputes or confusion.

There are plenty of different ways to communicate with your team. You can hold 1:1 meetings so that you can talk employer to employee. This direct and personal approach helps make everyone feel involved and important. You can have a group huddle round in a circle so that everyone can have his or her own say without feeling the pressure of power hierarchies. You can go with a more formal approach such as a sales meeting; it depends on the style of your organization and business.

2.      Determine your teams motives

You need to assess your team to discover exactly what works in motivating them, and what doesn’t. This way you won’t be wasting anyone’s time and you can get to the core of what motivates everyone for a better working environment. Conduct informal conversations with your team so that you can get on board their level and understand what motivates them from their feedback. If you really are tight for time, how about providing a questionnaire or survey that everyone can fill in when they have a moment free? To get everyone involved, you can have a group brainstorming session. This relaxed and fun approach will get straight to the point without beating around the bush.

3.      Recognize and reward your team

By acknowledging your team’s contributions and rewarding their successes, you’ll create a hard working group of people who enjoy reaching targets and goals. It is an essential part of running a team as it makes people feel good about what their doing, helping them feel motivated. Treat team members when they’ve done exceedingly well, be it a meal, or a day out. Make sure that you remember birthdays and anniversaries so that you can celebrate that with them in the work place. This will make them aware that they’re being recognized and play a valued part in your team.

4.      Empower everyone

By empowering your team members you will be creating a more positive working culture. It will also help build team spirit, as everyone will be motivated and feeling good about what they’re doing. Empowering your team also helps boost the creativity as it encourages people to be more involved and thoughtful because they care more.

There are various ways to empower you team. You can simply have meetings allowing people to discuss creative ideas and concepts. Group discussions are a great way of building creative sales ideas as everyone can build upon each other’s points. You can also change it up in the office, by giving everyone different roles now and then. This gives them a break from the ordinary, making them feel empowered and useful. A fun way of empowering your team is by having a “manager for the day”. This will help people who usually don’t talk mingle, and will make that individual feel inspired and established.

5.      Have fun

It is vitally important to have fun with your team. Work shouldn’t be all doom and gloom. By having team outings you’ll start to realize how important it is for everyone to have a laugh. The team will feel more relaxed with each other, taking pressure off the stresses of workloads and deadlines. Feeling like a team, everyone will be able to encourage and inspire each other to make sure the work gets done. Engage in weekly team building exercises, be it a game, or a contest, or playing a motivational song, you want everyone to get involved! This way everyone will enjoy coming to work and will get the job done to a high quality standard.

By Pearl Whitehead