Motivating Employees - A Leadership Goal

In today's challenging scenario keeping your employees motivated is one of the biggest challenges. A good salary, good working conditions, treating your employees with respect and recognizing their efforts certainly goes a long way but is at times not enough to motivate all employees.Your employees need to believe in your vision. They need to believe in the organizational goals. Motivating employees is inspiring them to be their best. For that they need to be inspired by the leadership. To motivate them, to be a good leader, you need to be the best. It is as simple as that. When you are competent, skilled, the best - you gain respect and the effect percolates down the chains inspiring and motivating employees. An employee's performance is related to the degree of his motivation.'I feel most motivated when I get a mail from my manager praising me for a job well done. I feel like doing even better the next day,' gushed a marketing executive. To get the most out of your employees you need to have an individual strategy for each one of them. The task of motivating employees is very important. It needs time and patience. You need to know your employees better. What drives them? Find out what they worship - is it prestige? Salary? Peer recognition? Adulation? Ask them their career goals and their vision. And then you can strategize your motivational moves. Never neglect your high performing employees. Keeping talent working for your company is also a talent. Rewarding your good employees may work for some time as a motivating tool but you need to tighten up the slackers too. There is nothing more de-motivating than working with the slackers and discovering that their slack goes unnoticed. Training and coaching employees is a good strategy of motivating employees, but one needs to keep the life cycle of an employee also in mind. Youngsters may benefit immensely with a training workshop where as teaching new ways to employees who are in the middle of their career spans may not appreciate it and actually resent being taught the new methods. You need to tread carefully here and find a mid way to make them understand the benefits of using new methods being taught in training workshops.Flexibility in an organization can be used as a strong motivating tool.'Work from home option' or 'Set your own office hours' or 'Take a day of your choice off in a week - if you work Saturdays' all these options instill confidence and trust in employees and they can build their lives around their jobs more efficiently. It promotes the culture of taking responsibility for one's work and instills pride in their organization.And sometimes even after you try everything, it is tough to motivate some employees. You choose your lot then and it is wise to stop fretting over the acorns that refuse to grow.