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How to motivate your staff

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26th Aug 2009
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Employee satisfaction is at an all-time low, so is now the time to consider motivation training, asks Stephanie Sparrow.

With numerous reports circulating of employees taking pay cuts and working shorter weeks in order to keep their companies afloat, it’s hard to see how the UK workforce could be accused of lacking in motivation. Nevertheless, more than a third of line managers admitted that attitude and motivation have become major training needs among their teams in a recent survey by training company Video Arts.

“A key challenge for organisations that have made redundancies - and also for those which have not faced lay-offs - is to find ways of improving motivation in these difficult times”, says Martin Addison, managing director of Video Arts.

“In the recession, some of the classic HR stuff like rewarding people with praise seems to have gone out of the window. Organisations are bogged down with problems like red tape and managing the outbreak of swine flu, but their managers should be giving employees small, achievable targets to boost motivation”, says Julie Balch, a team building specialist and managing director of Career Steps consultancy.

One good way to show staff that they are valued is to offer training. “It can help the rebuild capabilities and lift the spirits of employees”, argues Addison.

Management training has also gained in importance over the past few years and there are various forms it can take. “We’re seeing more distance learning, email support and telephone support built into programmes, all of which are getting good results”, says Balch.

Managers as ‘meaning makers’

The major challenge for line managers is to help employees find meaning in their work, says business psychologist and executive coach Emma Judge.

“Meaning and engagement are the two essentials. You can’t tell employees how to find meaning, but you can give them the questions which will help them understand what matters to them in their job”.

Judge suggests managers should act as ‘meaning makers’, helping employees to find their own personal sense of motivation, which in turn helps them to find the intrinsic meaning in what they do.

Judge points out that no one can actually train others to have a better attitude but that successful organisations are generated by good relationships and supportive peer networks. Team building exercises can kick start these relationships. Judge also advocates peer coaching or mentoring as a means of encouraging employees to build their own support networks within organisations.

Working together
However the topic is tackled, managers remain the lynchpin of a motivated workforce. To be effective in the current climate, they should be creating a sense of what their team needs to be doing together and focusing on those goals, according to executive coach Katherine Tulpa, chair of the Association for Coaching. “This builds a sense of community but team members should also be encouraged to coach each other towards their individual goals".

“There is a responsibility to tell the truth about what’s working well and to appreciate and celebrate success - and we could do a lot more of that," she concludes.

Stephanie Sparrow has 20 years' experience in writing about HR and training issues and is passionately interested in people development. She contributes to various publications and covers education topics for The Guardian newspaper.
She was highly commended in the Watson Wyatt Excellence in HR journalism awards.

This article is an extract from a feature published on our sister site, TrainingZone.co.uk. Click here to view the article in full.

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