Are you currently in a managerial position at your company? Or perhaps you own your own business. In either case, one topic that has surely come across your mind is how to retain and motivate talented staff. Talent is valuable, and loyal, productive talent even more so. It’s one thing to bring an employee with the right attitude and credentials to your team, and another matter entirely to keep and encourage them.
As a business process outsourcing company managing not one, but multiple teams for many drastically different kinds of businesses, we definitely agree it’s important to get both right. Read on for some tips on how to keep valuable team members and motivate them, inspired by some of our favourite business reads- we’ll share the list at the end.
1. Make sure your compensation levels at a minimum, meet market rates. While monetary compensation alone has shown to not be the best motivator for certain types of tasks, you do want to keep all your staff a good baseline.
2. Recognize their work, no matter what type of skill set they have. Make it a habit of acknowledging your staff’s work and remember to emphasize how important everything they are doing is to the company. This is especially important for staff tasked with repetitive, tedious tasks.
3. Reward your team with tangible prizes for procedural tasks, but not for tasks involving creativity. It has been shown that tangible (particularly monetary) rewards have been shown to negatively impact the enjoyment of creative tasks. Consider instead, non-tangible rewards like praise, good feedback, or the satisfaction of learning something new or mastering an existing task.
4. As stated above, encourage a love of learning. Test more senior staff for skill mastery by having them teach newer team members. It’s the best way to test knowledge of a given topic, and can reward the ‘trainer’ with the satisfaction mentioned above.
5. Create a company culture. Stand for something. Get your team members passionate about where they work. Take it beyond the written mission statement and actually get your staff to live by it, during their work days and of all your team members, you yourself should be following it to set an example.
We do hope the tips above will help you in building and maintaining a great team. Interested in learning more about the topic? Check out some of our favourite business books on the topics:
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink