Who was it that said businesses do not succeed, people do? We all know how important people are in our respective businesses but how much time do we really spend trying to engage and motivate those around us? Adrian Price, from Menzies LLP, examines some of the factors needed to engage and motivate employees.
So, why should a business ensure that its employees are engaged and motivated and how can levels of staff happiness, motivation and commitment directly affect your bottom line? We all live busy lives with constantly changing events that happen such as children, divorce, debt, retirement, promotion and so on. Therefore, if you can make small adjustments to support and help your employees with these events, how grateful would they be?
A happy and motivated workforce can help businesses achieve higher level of performance and if done correctly, can be done simply and implemented at minimal cost. Employee engagement leads to better performance, less absenteeism, less stress and more commitment.
High engagement businesses tend to have clearly defined job roles, recruit competent people with the right attitude, have good working environments, pay appropriately and are happy to invest in training and development. They also have metrics in place to help measure performance against KPIs.
How to motivate employees
The easiest and most direct way for a business to increase engagement is to modify the way individual jobs and teams are organised, for example by job autonomy, task variety and job significance.
The vision and strategy also has to be right otherwise there is no alignment of thinking or buy-in from anyone. Culture and values are important if you are truly going to succeed.
Franchise forums can be very helpful here and there is nothing more powerful than a franchisee informing other franchisees about good practice since they will listen to their peers.
Introduce appraisals to the strategy and objectives and use them to get staff feedback. This can be done by implementing regular dialog to discuss current performance, setting objectives that clearly link to business goals and understand employee’s long-term goals.
Furthermore, tie them into a rewards programme that benefits top performers, either via salary increases and bonuses or non-financial rewards such as extra training or holiday incentives.
“Employee engagement leads to better performance, less absenteeism, less stress and more commitment.” Most importantly, you need to nurture and develop talent. The art of a good leader depends on many things but getting the right people doing the right job and getting the best out of them is a true skill.
Preventing your best and brightest from looking for opportunities elsewhere is much cheaper than constantly recruiting and training new staff and is likely to be the largest expense on your balance sheet.
However, things do go wrong so you need performance management systems to coach, mentor and develop people, and to manage departures in a sensitive and legal manner. All the risk items need careful planning which can be covered by producing contracts and documents such as a staff handbook. The naïve employer can pay a lot of compensation for getting it wrong.
If you require any further information on any of the issues raised above, please contact Adrian Price
on 01489 566700 or aprice@menzies.co.uk