Rick Goodman — September 18, 2017 — September 18, 2017
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It’s a common conundrum—and as a motivational speaker, it’s something I see all the time: Team leaders want to motivate their people, but don’t necessarily have the resources to provide salary bumps or additional PTO days.
I’ve written about this at length, because I think it’s a critical problem to address. My basic argument is this: While you do need to put some money into employee engagement sometimes, there are also some motivational techniques that won’t cost you a dime—and they can actually be incredibly beneficial to your entire team.
Today, I’m going to focus on three of the main ones.
Have a Non-Financial Goal for Your Team to Rally Behind
You should always be laying out objectives for your team members to rally behind. It’s fine for an objective to be financial in its nature—e.g., “let’s have our best sales quarter ever”—but that kind of motivation is innately short-term and fleeting. It’s better to tap into an even bigger and broader sense of purpose: Getting the best customer satisfaction scores in your industry, becoming the recognized thought leader in your space, helping the most people, improving the most lives.
In short: Help your team members to feel like they are working toward a significant goal—not just making more money.
Let Employees Weigh In
Hopefully, your company has a sense of mission—and you choose the work you do based on how it fits within that sense of mission. I would also recommend giving employees a say here. If there is a big project or a new client that your team really doesn’t like—for moral or social reasons, or just because it’s a bad fit for the business—that’s something you should really listen to. Allow employees to know that you care about their buy-in, and aren’t just assigning them work unthinkingly.
Make Your Mission Statement Pervasive
You might be surprised by how often employees simply don’t know the values or mission of the company—because these things are never imparted to them. As a leader, it falls to you to make sure everyone gets the memo. Make printed copies of your company mission statement available to everyone, and review these values together with your team on a regular basis.
A sense of mission should pervade everything you do—and provide your employees with something that’s both unifying and motivating!
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