Unemployment is at an all-time low; competition for candidates is fierce; the cost and time to hire are continually rising.  The smart money is on keeping and improving the staff you have.  The question is how do you motivate your team to not only get the basic tasks of their job done, but excel to advance your company?

Here are the ways we get our employees to respond and give us the most they can offer.

People are motivated by how positive the future looks.  Employers are always scratching their head when an employee leaves.  They say, "they seemed happy", "they never had a complaint about their job", "we paid them well and never worked them too hard".  The real question is how did they feel about their future?

Engage your employees by giving them a plan for promotion.  Whether it is a month, a year, or longer, tell them how they can achieve a greater position than they are in now.  Your staff will work hard to keep the respect you showed them by caring about their future.

There many other ways to measure the value of compensation, than just the paycheck.  Benefit value, paid time off, contribution to retirement, and training and education.  The average company only spends $700 per year per employee on training, and most of that is invested in training for management.

How can you ask your team to be better performers, without giving them resources to improve?  Investing in training builds confidence in your company, and loyalty.  In most sales industries like Automotive, Insurance, Furniture, companies spend 50x as much on advertising as training.  Imagine if you moved some of the ad budget to training, so your staff sold more of the people that came into your company.

Everyone wants to have a voice.  We are more motivated to engage in an activity if we have involvement in the planning.  A top complaint of employees is that they are told by managers how they need to complete tasks, even though the manager is rarely involved directly in doing the work themselves.

Create a process that gives your staff the ability to suggest improvements.  This can be a meeting, email inbox for suggestions, or even one on one sessions.  Take the time to thoroughly vet suggestions and then implement some.  Let the entire team know who suggested the improvement and how you think it will help.

Incentives are a great way to get an employees juices flowing.  One of the better incentives is paid time off.  Give the team goals, whether it is sales, time worked, or hours billed and attached a bonus of time off.  Let the high achievers share the spoils with their family.  One of the largest stresses and reasons for employees leaving is an inability to budget time for family.

If an employee is going to work hard to produce sales, or complete work at a month end give them a light at the end of tunnel.  They will be much more likely to work hard when you need it.

Thanks for taking the time to read our post.  We hope it helps stir up the troops.  If you need help hiring just ask.  We can definitely help you with that.