Nigerian Entrepreneur

To keep your extraordinary employees happy and productive in your start-up company or small business, you must learn how to motivate them. This is particularly important when they need to help you overcome the challenges you will encounter while growing and stabilising your business. Remember that your most talented workers are most likely doing the job of two or more people and you will still want them to remain loyal to the company even in difficult times. Here are some vital tips on how to motivate your best employees:

 

Engage Them in Inclusive Goal Setting

Set corporate goals that can be broken down into quantifiable objectives for your top talent. These objectives will motivate your employees to be more productive, and when they are achieved, they will provide a strong sense of accomplishment. It is vital to let your exceptional staff see the big picture and help them understand how each task or project they do fits into it. This will motivate your talented employees to exceed your expectations.

 

Set Smart Weekly Goals

Break down your lofty corporate ambitions and targets into simple and achievable weekly goals. Then set them before your talented workers, requesting that they create action plans to achieve them. For instance, instead of telling them that you want to make a profit of $100 million dollars this year, tell them that they should focus on acquiring 100 new customers every week or make sales worth $2 million by selling products worth 20,000 to each of the 100 customers each week.

 

Give Higher Responsibilities

Talented workers love to demonstrate their work and results to others. So give them an opportunity to lead discussions at meetings. Instead of presiding at every meeting, learn to become a coordinator while your best talent share their opinions. This will help them to become partners in the business and enable them to develop an entrepreneurial spirit. Not only will they be eager to prove their worth, they will also be motivated to follow their suggestions through with action until they make their ideas a reality.

 

Provide Feedback and Rewards

Give feedback every week to each team and individual. From the onset, design a feedback system that is transparent and inspiring. Attach points to each person’s performance and let them have a dashboard that shows them how well they are performing on a weekly basis. At the end of each month, put the results together and provide a reward that will be of value to your workers. Rewards can come in diverse forms such as awards, badges, special recognition, cash, and special privileges.

 

Express Your Trust in Them

Tell your top talent that you trust them to perform above and beyond your expectations. Making statements like, “I believe in you, I know you have the talent and exceptional ability to meet and exceed this performance goals”, can arouse a strong desire for excellence in your workers. Before you realise it, they will start to work hard to fit into the image you have painted for them with your words.

 

Foster Growth and Continuous Education

Exceptional employees will want to get to the pinnacle of their career. You can use this inner desire as an avenue to motivate them by providing with opportunities to take classes and acquire prestigious industry certifications. Let them know that you are committed to help them grow professionally. In addition to formal learning, you should also provide more challenging tasks and opportunities to perform roles such as team leader and project manager, especially when they have demonstrated their commitment on simpler assignments.

 

Discover Each Employee’s Inner Passion

Focus on each individual’s personal aspirations and do your best to help them achieve what they desire. Sit down with each of your talented employees and ask them questions about their professional and personal lives. Find out the type of tasks they like and the ones they will want stop doing. Strive to match each project or task to their passion and abilities. Very soon they will begin to see more as a mentor than as a boss. When this happens, their commitment to you and your company will take a new turn.

 

Using creative techniques to motivate your extraordinary workers can drastically improve their performance and keep them in your company even when they could have opted for more lucrative jobs in larger companies. If you help your workers to see the big picture in what they do, and offer regular feedback and rewards for good performance, they will become more productive. And your workers being productive is exactly what you need in order to maintain your business successfully growing.

 

Mila Payton is an economist by profession. Besides working in profession, she enjoys writing, and is always eager to tackle interesting business, entrepreneurship and career stories. While looking for answers, she can be found on business events worldwide.

Tags: small business

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2016 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur, Guest Post, small business, Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.