10 Research-Based Ways To Motivate Your Employees

1. Improve Trust In Your Management Team

Management is who the rest of your team looks to for support, positive feedback, and constructive critiques. Having a trustworthy team of supervisors is one of the most important ways to instill a positive company culture on a big-picture scale.

Employee perception of fairness is impacted by their experience and trust in their leaders. Without trust in management, workers may feel that promotions and other workplace decisions are unfair. This drastically affects the company culture and can affect interpersonal workplace relationships.

Boost trust by being clear about values and sticking to them, being transparent and upfront even when it comes to difficult decisions, and making sure that what you say aligns with your actions. One of the quickest ways to gain trust is by sticking to your word.

2. Cultivate a Positive Company Culture

Companies with exceptional workplace cultures see greater success than those without. Research has found that employees rate companies more positively when they develop a positive company culture.

You may be asking: “Sure, but what even is a positive company culture?” While it may seem subjective, strong company cultures often bear many of the same hallmarks: An emphasis on employee wellness; opportunities for employees to find meaning and purpose in their work; shared goals and objectives; and a senior leadership team that listens to employees.

One positive change that some companies have started to cultivate a positive culture includes employee recognition notes to staff thanking them for their hard work.

Another change many teams are making is increasing the emphasis on wellness and work-life balance, which are important factors in company-wide happiness levels. Companies with a positive culture put their employee’s health first and are more willing to offer perks like paid leave and flexible work schedules.

3. Provide Stipends for Learning and Education

One of the main reasons in-person and remote working staff might leave a position is because they feel stuck. By promoting education and learning, your team can feel like they have the opportunity to grow and better themselves within your company rather than needing to look elsewhere for personal and professional development.

Ten years ago, educational stipends for professional development could have run thousands of dollars per year – funding an employee to travel cross-country for a conference, for example.

These days, the explosion of online learning platforms like Code Academy or LinkedIn Learning means even a small education stipend (say, $100 per quarter) can provide world-class educational opportunities for motivated employees.

4. Craft a Company Mission Consistent With Day-to-Day Work

Many companies create value statements simply because they feel like they need to. While goal setting and a mission statement can help a company stay grounded, there are times when employees can start to feel like these statements are superficial. A good way to make value statements seem consistent is by ensuring they line up with what’s happening daily in the company.

Companies must embed their values into their systems for employees to feel like they are working towards a common goal altogether. For example, a company that rarely brings up its mission statements is not likely to follow them accordingly. A lack of consistency may associate these rarely-discussed talking points with a veneer or superficiality.

Crafting a mission statement should feel hard, because it is hard. Go too narrow, and a mission statement can feel uninspiring. Go too broad, and it can feel pretentious or grandiose. The worst mission statements feel like word salad. The best ones are often the shortest, like Zoom’s three-word credo: “Make communications frictionless.”

5. Celebrate Your Employees’ Professional and Personal Accomplishments

When’s the last time you celebrated a team member in a public forum? When’s the last time you offered authentic, thoughtful praise in a 1:1 with a direct report?

Giving people recognition for accomplishments helps them see that the company values them and that their contributions are not going unnoticed. This makes work feel more meaningful and purposeful, which can drive everyone to put in better work day in, and day out.

6. Automate Gifts For Birthdays, Work Anniversaries, and Holidays

By far, the easiest, bang-for-your-buck motivational perk you can offer is simply giving gifts for special occasions, like birthdays, holidays, or work anniversaries.

It’s shocking how many companies let birthdays and work anniversaries pass by and do nothing to celebrate these milestones. Still more companies will send an impersonal gift card for the holidays, thinking that will motivate their teams.

Often, workplace gifts fall on the shoulders of the Human Resources department, which has little time to devote to tracking down gifts for potentially hundreds of individuals.

Corporate gifting efforts tend to be tacky, inauthentic, sporadic, and inequitable – with different managers following different playbooks for different employees. Goody for Business allows you to automate your gift-sending efforts. All of the humanity with none of the human error.

That’s because you can hook up your HRIS with Goody’s unique gifting platform, and automatically send gifts when an employee’s anniversary or birthday rolls around. Employees can swap gifts if they prefer – and 50% do – which ensures none of your gifting budget is going to waste on presents that people don’t want.

7. Offer Clear Paths for Career Advancement

Generally, employees want to grow internally in their workplace as they feel more comfortable and understand the operating procedures. They likely have friends, a favorite lunch spot nearby, or appreciate the benefits the company offers (401k, insurance, etc.)

When you make it clear how an employee can advance in their given career path, you make it easier for people to stay with you than seek out other opportunities with a competitor.

Recognizing team members’ strengths and talent through promotion helps keep them eager for more growth and gives them the incentive to work harder. A bias towards promoting internally over recruiting externally makes it clear to every employee that their hard work will be rewarded.

8. Provide Lifestyle and Wellness Benefits

Some of the most successful companies recognize that staff members have lives outside of the job. When you give your team members lifestyle and wellness benefits, you make them feel cared for and help to reduce burnout.

70% of employees enrolled in wellness programs report higher job satisfaction than those not enrolled.

Offering perks like stipends towards gym memberships, or even monthly self-care gifts, can go a long way toward helping everyone stay motivated and functioning at their best.

9. Do Something Surprising

It’s fun to throw a surprise party for a friend’s birthday, and surprising your coworkers can have a similar morale-boosting, joyous effect. Surprises activate the dopamine system in the brain, which focuses attention and inspires us to look at situations in new ways. This shift in perspective can help us all subconsciously be more engaged in our work by viewing it through a different lens.

Sending someone a gift when they least expect it can go a long way toward showing them how much you genuinely care about them, and this can easily influence their ability to work hard.

Send your employees a gift or branded swag to celebrate a company milestone or accomplishment.

The more unexpected your gesture, the more motivating it will feel. Think about how much more memorable a gift in August would be, compared with a gift in mid-December.

10. Just Ask!

Managers, leaders, HR personnel, and bosses have a lot to gain when they ask their staff members: What motivates you?

Every employee may have a different answer. For some, it’s about internal recognition. For others, public recognition makes their skin crawl. Some employees are motivated by emotional connections with their team. Others want to move the needle on business goals.

As a leader, it’s essential to put in the work to uncover the source of your team members’ motivation and tailor your efforts accordingly.