Tuesday, April 23, 2019

How do you motivate your employees?


Motivating your employees has become this days one of the biggest problem in all companies; what techniques do we have to use to keep our employees happy?
As we all know, there are 2 types of incentives: financial and non-financial


The most common financial incentive is the salary system - we all have the basic salary and we can add other elements like meal tickets, transport allowance, house rent allowance etc.
One of the principal financial incentives are bonuses - individual or collective. But from my own experience and from the talks I had with other colleagues the happiness from this bonuses won't last long because when we talk about money, we all want more 😀😁
A real problem with the individual performance is how to eliminate the feeling of discrimination, because there will always be someone that thinks that he should have  more than his colleagues. To avoid this problem we have to have a strong list of KPI's for each department, each job.
Other incentives can be: retirement bonuses, commission or other extra earnings like educations facilities, medical and car allowance. Also profit sharing for all employees can be a motivating.

When you talk of non-financial incentives, this is the part where the HR people can be creative.
According to your company profile and your type of employees you can use: recognition. For this to be positively embraced, you have to know who's your employee leader/mentor and he can be the one who gives the feedback. There are studies that shows that the feedback that comes from the leader/ stakeholder is more effective than the feedback from HR or others. Dinner with THE BOSS is a motivator factor that shows your employee that their work is valued, that you care about them.
Recently I read an article about a firm from UK where the turnover rate is under 0.5% and the answer at the question:"Why do you love working here?", the common answer was: "Our boss knows who we are, knows our family". So..get to know your employees! 
Another motivator factor is the work conditions. Invest in the offices, in what other little things you can put in your office to make your employees happy - massage chair, a nice area where you can relax and have your meal.
Events also for your employees family, can give them a reason to stay in the company. They can be a little expensive but if it grows the performance it's totally worth it (Easter / Christmas Party, food fest, open doors day).
Training and development -  for the young generation, a big part of their needs is the opportunity to develop themselves.Investing in training gives the benefit of improving their work and keep them happy.

But what can you do new in this field? I've tried to find out what other HR departments are doing and I managed to see some good ideas like:

  • a company in automotive industry supports their employees in development of their hobbies: one of the employees knits baby clothes so the company made it public inside their organizations but also on LinkedIn page. The same company declared March - the women month and shared on LinkedIn page the female employees and the importance for the organizations(more info here.)  
  • Also they made their employees ambassadors of the organization publicly because the idea that we hide our employees because we are afraid they will be stolen by our competitors doesn't exists and they are celebrating their  employees and the work they do for the company (Example A and Example B )
  • another company made an inside library and every month each of the employees makes a list with what books they want and the company buys them.
  • Endava has a week of training and events for all the employees in all their offices.
  • Delphi Technologies has a annual party for the employees and their family
  • Amazon - almost every week they are promoting their employees on LinkedIn

What do you do to make your employees happy? What new things do you have in your company?

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