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10 Ways To Stimulate Employee Motivation

Today’s fast-moving business environment demands that the effective manager be both a well-organized administrator and highly adept in understanding people’s basic needs and behaviour in the workplace. Gaining commitment, nurturing talent, and ensuring employee motivation and productivity require open communication and trust between managers and staff.

1. Understand their behaviour

People at work naturally tend to adopt instinctive modes of behaviour that are self-protective rather than open and collaborative. This explains why emotion is a strong force in the workplace and why management often reacts violently to criticisms and usually seeks to control rather than take risks. So, in order to eliminate this kind of perspective and to increase employee motivation, it is best that you influence behaviour rather than to change personalities. Insisting what you expect from your employees will only worsen the situation.

2. Be sure that people’s lower-level needs are met.

People have various kinds of needs. Examples of lower-level needs are salary, job security, and working conditions. In order to increase employee motivation, you have to meet these basic needs. Consequently, failures with basic needs nearly always explain dissatisfaction among staff. Satisfaction, on the other hand, springs from meeting higher-level needs, such as responsibility progress, and personal growth. When satisfaction is met, chances are employee motivation is at hand.

3. Encourage pride

People need to feel that their contribution is valued and unique. If you are a manager, seek to exploit this pride in others, and be proud of your own ability to handle staff with positive results. This, in turn, will encourage employee motivation among your people.

4. Listen carefully

In many areas of a manager’s job, from meetings and appraisals to telephone calls, listening plays a key role. Listening encourages employee motivation and, therefore, benefits both you and your staff. So make an effort to understand people’s attitudes by careful listening and questioning and by giving them the opportunity to express themselves.
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7 Lessons I Learned From an Accidental Millionaire

When I first met Stephanie Frank author of The Accidental Millionaire I had no idea how much my life would be affected by our budding friendship. It wasn’t because she was a best selling author, internationally known speaker and coach. Actually it was much more profoundly simpler than that.

Stephanie has the unique gift to be able to concepts that most people never understand the actions to take and create a process or blue print that makes business almost like the paint by numbers game. After a delightful interview with her I was left some pearls that will surely help you in business and life.

Here are 7 lessons I have learned from her:

1. Be a million dollar thinker. Most people get caught up in the “how” to do something. When they don’t have the answers they start second guessing and sabotaging themselves from the start. Million dollars thinkers do not operate that way. Once they make a decision they look for the solutions. They create a vision and a plan.

2. Make sure your goals are congruent with your top 3 values in life. I love this one. How many times have you been presented an opportunity and the only thing the person could tell you is how much money you’re going to make? Don’t me wrong, I am an ethical capitalist however all money is not good money.

For example, some people might not be successful in the real estate foreclosure market because they would feel like they were taking advantage of people during hard times. However, another person in that exact situation might view themselves as being an advisor to someone who would otherwise lose their home and get nothing from it. As you can see it’s the same situation but each person has a different value system.
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Titanic Precautions

Many movies have been made about the tragic story of the Titanic. Arrogance and ignorance was definitely present during its maiden voyage, which was Titanic’s last voyage.

Many warnings were given, but unfortunately, the warnings were not taken seriously. On April 14th, 1912 Titanic received six warnings that icebergs were present in their perimeter. On the night of April 14th, Titanic struck an iceberg and ultimately sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

For other entities, what happened to the Titanic does NOT have to happen to them. Many have learned from the mistakes that Titanic had made.

There are several examples that follow and form a parallel to what happened to Titanic and how an entity can learn from Titanic’s mistakes.

1. The Titanic only had 16 lifeboats, which was not nearly enough to save everyone on the ship.

Only about 60% of the entire lifeboats’ capacity was utilized! Does your company have a disaster plan in place? Are your computers, especially your servers, being backed up on a regular basis? Many servers are now being backed up on a daily basis and sometimes on an hourly basis.

When I was working at a Helpdesk, one of our afternoon gals was named the “Backup Queen” because she took EVERY major server backup VERY seriously. The company was very lucky to have the “Backup Queen” because there were several instances where our most critical server had crashed and lost information. Fortunately, information restoration was quick and painless due to the machine being backed up on a regular basis.

We were very lucky to have someone who took the initiative to handle the server backups. Is your company that lucky? Yes, doing backups can be VERY unexciting. However, losing valuable data can be very exciting, but in a negative way.

2. The crewmen in the lookout tower, or the “crow’s nest,” were not issued binoculars to better search for icebergs.

Employees were not given the proper tools to use to do their job. Is your company using the right software for the job? Are you saving money on upgrading your operating system and software, but are losing customers? If you are losing customers, you’re NOT really saving any money at all.
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Buying A Franchise

Buying a franchise can be a life changing experience. There are many good reasons to pursue your dream of owning a successful franchise. For starters when you buy a franchise you are buying a proven system. Buying a franchise comes with the advantage of knowing that the business has been successful in other locations. The idea and process of running this business has already been proven. Therefore the learning curve in operating the business can be virtually eliminated.

When you are buying a franchise your are also buying an established customer base or brand name. Most franchises are already recognizable to consumers. The brand awareness provides security and trust to the customer who expects uniform quality to be provided. Therefore a customer base is already established.

You can also benefit from any advertising or promotion that the franchiser (owner of the franchise) does at the national or local level, without absorbing the cost. The franchiser can also provide input to the franchisee on a local marketing plan.
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