How to Keep Your Staff Motivated

Keeping your staff motivated can be the key to success for many businesses. If your staff are happy and healthy they are more likely to be more motivated to do a good job and go above and beyond for the business. There is the constant risk that poor motivation across the workforce can have severe consequences for your business, such as staff retention and the quality of work.  

In this article, we’ll cover some of the ways that you can boost employee motivation in the workforce. Including how you can improve staff retention, the benefits of training and development schemes, and communicating with your employees. 

For further information read below or, contact our HR experts today on 01455 858 132.

Why is staff motivation important? 

It’s important to ensure that your staff are motivated. It can have some significant benefits for your business, as employees will be more willing to go that extra step for your business. 

Equally not motivating your staff can have severe risks for your business. Employees who aren’t happy and healthy will be less productive and the quality of work will be lower. Unmotivated employees can lead to your business having a higher staff turnover, causing reputational damage both inside the company and outside. 

How can I Boost retention? 

As a business owner, employee retention is an important topic to consider. Implementing policies that are designed to improve retention can include, training and development schemes, we’ll go into a bit more detail on this later. Creating clear policies on how your company will develop an individual's skills can generate long-term commitment and motivate your employees to reach new goals and milestones. 

Communication can be an effective tool to boost retention.  You can improve morale within your team and encourage them to stay. Poor communication within your team can lead to disengaged staff and potentially an increase in misconduct cases. To avoid insubordination or misconduct you can create open honest communication channels between you and your team to bring forward any grievances they have. 

Utilising employee assistance programmes (EAP) can help retain staff, reduce absences and increase productivity. As they are able to offer employees independent and confidential advice about aspects of their work and personal life. 

What Benefits can I offer?

There are many benefits for your business if you can improve staff motivation. We’ve put together some of the benefits that you can offer your employees to boost motivation. 

Does pay motivate employees?

What you are willing to pay your staff is a tool that you can use to attract, motivate and retain your employees. If you aren’t sure what salary you should be offering, you can carry out an online salary search. This is an easy salary benchmarking tool that gives you instant data. This will give you insight into what your competitors are offering candidates for similar roles.

The last few years have seen individuals questioning whether having more money is more beneficial to them or if more practical benefits are. 

What are the practical benefits I can offer?  

A practical benefit that can significantly boost staff motivation is offering a pay rise, and in the current climate, it’s likely to be a big help. With that said, it's not always possible especially when employers are facing similar struggles. 

Although a pay rise isn’t the only practical benefit that an employer can offer, looking at what expenses an employee is likely to have while working, you can start to come up with somewhat creative solutions to help. For example, look at travel expenses. Do you have multiple team members coming from the same town or village who can carpool?

Can you implement working from home or a hybrid work model in your business? This will help employees cut down on their commuting costs and be a key motivating factor for employees to stay with your business instead of looking for a job that allows for hybrid working or is close to them. 

Improving the work/ life balance 

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, employees have started to put a push on their employers to offer benefits that help them create a better work/ life balance. There are a few benefits that employers can put in place to help their employees. 

Flexible working 

Where flexible working is a statutory right, employers can reject the request if they think there will be an adverse impact on the business, using one or more of the 8 reasons specified by the law. Employers can choose how they want to implement flexible working and when. This could be implemented from day one. This working pattern is designed to fit the employee's needs. 

Hybrid working 

Hybrid working is a type of flexible working but this allows employees to split their week up between working from home and in the office. This way gives the employees the freedom they need to meet their personal needs. 

Family-friendly 

There is a number of instances where leave is a statutory right. These include maternity and paternity leave. As an employer, however, you can go beyond these minimums in your policies. 

Health-related

Health-related, companies can offer their employees the option to have menstrual leave, andropause and menopause support.

Are my existing employee benefits working?

It is important to remember that your workforce is diverse and therefore your staff benefits need to be inclusive.  

You can use your benefits to emphasise how you are helping employees through the cost of living crisis. 

For example, 

• offering discounts.
• short-term salary advances.
• offering money-saving information on the platforms that the employees already have access to.

Not all the benefits that you offer your employees have to be financial, you can offer support in different aspects of their life. Such as 

• Mental health
• Opticians. 
• Health insurance. 

If the benefits that you’re currently offering aren’t working with the majority of your employees it may be time to reassess the benefits. Encourage employees to tell you what they want you to give them. Including your employees in these types of conversations will make your employees feel like they are being included in the decisions that will affect them. 

How can I help my employees stay happy and healthy? 

Helping your employees stay healthy and happy while they are at work, isn’t limited to only motivating your employees. It can help you manage your team's absences. Utilising online management tools can help you identify patterns in absences and bring concerns up with your employee. If they are absent for sickness, it will help to identify when an employee needs more support.

As an employer, you have a duty of care to help your employees manage their stress levels. Ensuring they aren’t becoming overwhelmed with work or struggling with poor relationships with coworkers. Ask yourself how you can support your staff, Croner has a 24/7 HR helpline that can help you tackle these issues. 

Give employees access to mindfulness and meditation apps and counselling services that boosts the well-being of your team in and out of work. EAPs can include 

• Counselling.
• Financial.
• Legal.
• Health support such as weight loss and alcohol reduction. 

It’s important to remember that a healthy and happy employee is more likely to be more productive, engaged and perform better while they are at work. 

Training and development schemes

Creating training and development opportunities in your business are twofold. As an employer, you have an easier time retaining staff as you are showing employees that you have a vested interest in them becoming more skilled. This adds more value to the business. Training schemes can optimise the employee's experience at your company as they have goals they can work towards. 

Ensuring that your managers have been trained will help them become better equipped to perform their duties and support their teams. This will help you reduce the risk of employees becoming overwhelmed, and ensure that important issues aren’t going unnoticed. 

Through training and development, you can help your employees help themselves. Utilising the skills of each team member can encourage skill sharing. You can create a group of like-minded individuals who can motivate each other to better themselves. 

Communicating with staff 

As we’ve previously mentioned, keeping an open line of communication with your employees can help boost your staff retention, and improve employee motivation and company culture. 

Maintaining a high level of communication with your employees means that they aren’t finding out important company information, such as key company developments, staffing changes and redundancy through their colleagues. It should be from management first. An easy way of ensuring communication is to have regular emails and meeting to update staff on what is going on in the business. 

Need help motivating your staff? 

Croner has a team of award-winning HR consultants who are specialists in their field. We've been helping businesses for over 80 years and our advice line is open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Why not speak to a Croner expert on 0800 124 4378.