Easy and practical tips for keeping your team motivated

For businesses, ensuring that teams work together in harmony is very crucial to the completion of projects in time. However, even if every member of a team is highly creative but the team lacks motivation as a unit, results would become harder to achieve. For superiors, keeping teams working under them motivated could be a bit of a challenge but it is surprisingly easy to do also. Here are some easy and practical tips that can help you keep your team motivated.

1. Communicate well
Your team won’t be able to get any work done if they simply don’t understand what it is that you want from them. When working with teams, communicating goals and targets clearly is the key to success. Before commencing a project, put the goals in front of the team through a presentation or a poster. Then send out individual emails to make each team member understand their part in it. If you want to discourage certain behaviors and promote the desirable ones, you would need to tell your team about it clearly and concisely as well.

2. Define roles clearly
Getting quality work out of a team is like cooking. You need every ingredient in a specific quantity to make a dish work. Similarly, when working with a team, you need all the members of the team to perform their individual functions well to make the project come together. Clearly defining roles within the team will let individuals know what is expected of them and what they need to do to meet the teams’ goals.

3. Set up targets smartly
If you ask the tech guy to be in charge of making coffee and ask the mailroom person to beef up your website’s security, you’ll end up with a hot mess real soon. As a leader, you need to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each member of your team. This will help you set up realistic and manageable goals for each and every one of them. This also greatly streamlines projects and makes reaching goals easier for everyone involved.

4. Celebrate every milestone and success
A lot of business setups think of office celebrations as a waste of their time and resources. However, celebrating together as a group helps team members bond together more intimately which boosts their productivity by much. Celebrate events like birthdays in the office with a cake, throw 20-minute baby showers for pregnant team members, hold potluck office picnics to celebrate national holidays and when your team has done really well or reached a hard goal, throw an office party to celebrate it. Letting team members know that their personal celebrations matter to you helps you win their trust while celebrating team achievements together helps them stay motivated to perform well in the future as well.

5. Development of skills
Not every member of your staff would be blessed with all the skill they need to do well when they begin a particular project. You would need to ensure that your team members stay at the top of their game skill wise. Hold seminars and workshops for developing skills and use mentorship and internal training programs to boost the skill set of your team members and help them stay motivated.

6. Understand the team’s challenges
Even if it’s isn’t your job to worry about how your team gets their work done, you should make an effort to understand what challenges and obstacles they face during projects. You don’t have to do their jobs for them, you simply need to hold meetings every now and then to assess how you’re team members are doing, what challenges they are facing and how those challenges can be overcome effectively.

7. Lead from the front
Most bosses have moved up the ranks to get to where they are. However, if they take their positions for granted and make their staff feel like they are simply riding on the hard work that the team is putting in for them, they will become unmotivated and discouraged very easily. To prevent this mindset from setting in, you need to show your team that you really are the boss, you need to be in the know of everything that happens and you need to provide guidance and leadership whenever they need it.

About The Author: Alia is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, traveling and reading books. She contributes on ReputationChanger.com.

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