Business productivity is the one true benchmark for how well a company is doing and what its future prospects are. We talk a lot about how companies and their heads should motivate and enable employees. However, this post is going to be more about how employees view motivation and how they correlate it with productivity.
We’ve mentioned in the past that perks and benefits are a great booster but do not actually add to business productivity. In fact, they may indeed hamper business productivity and overall growth if used too often. Instead, companies should focus on productivity-enabling advantages and career growth-based mentoring to make the most of their in-house talent.
Here are the most important things that actually develop employee motivation and boost business productivity:
5 Factors that Actually Work on Boosting Employee Motivation and Enhance Business Productivity
Coherent Communication is Everything
Key Takeaways:
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Companies that focus on communicating plans openly and inclusively tend to gain a lot more traction from their performance development activities.
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“The way employees trust leaders is by believing that they’re real and have a sense of authenticity. That requires a leader to be vulnerable.”
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the best thing executives and managers can do for employees is create a robust employee engagement and communication system.
Productivity and performance management hinges upon doing things up with everyone onboard.
Companies that focus on communicating plans openly and inclusively tend to gain a lot more traction from their performance development activities. The reason why this happens is that employees seek soft capital and investment in a company. Any business requires experts and professionals and employees understand that moving up demands making significant contributions to the business process. Creating employee performance and productivity works best when employees can invest their personal and professional expertise in the business process.
Let’s take a page from the playbook of Thumbtack founder, Marco Zappacosta, on motivation and communication in this Fortune article. He says,
“The way employees trust leaders is by believing that they’re real and have a sense of authenticity. That requires a leader to be vulnerable,” said Zappacosta. “You don’t just get to be authentic when it’s easy, fun, high fives, and all good—but also when it’s hard or when it’s boring.”
As this McKinsey blog explains, the best thing executives and managers can do for employees is create a robust employee engagement and communication system. Integrating employee engagement apps like LEAD bot helps in creating the right kind of employee interaction process where they receive communication and generate discussion with manager feedback. This helps in creating a good feedback loop that enables employees to provide their views while ensuring managers deliver insights to drive business productivity and team performance upward.
Goal Setting is a Key Motivator
Key Takeaways:
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A clearly defined goal and well-defined metrics for measuring performance, employees feel like they can achieve their targets and chart for success.
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It helps managers provide valuable feedback to employees and creates an environment of data plenitude for use in niche domains like people science.
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Using regular performance benchmarks also helps in fostering talent via changemakers and employees who showcase pronounced skills in multiple domains.
Performance and productivity are directly linked to goal orientation. This is true not just for business teams but teams of any kind including sports. When you have a clearly defined goal and well-defined metrics for measuring performance, employees feel like they can achieve their targets and chart for success. This is one of the biggest factors for creating strong performance measurement rapport between executives, managers, and employees. Further, it helps managers provide valuable feedback to employees and creates an environment of data plenitude for use in niche domains like people science. This helps in driving meaningful conversations about boosting performance and ensures steadily growing productivity.
Another reason goal setting with clear performance markers works is that it enables better cross-team collaborations. When liaisons from one department have to work with other departments, they benefit immensely from understanding how to drive their collaboration. Using regular performance benchmarks also helps in fostering talent via changemakers and employees who showcase pronounced skills in multiple domains.
For example, goal setting for cost and revenue turnovers for a team member who is also able at accounting is an ideal foregrounding for a project management specialist with an eye for accounting. Opportunities like these are beneficial for managers who are often overworked and could delegate tasks to trusted subordinates. On the other hand, employees looking to move up the ranks by establishing connections and developing skills on the job.
5 Factors that Actually Work on Boosting Employee Motivation and Enhance Business Productivity
Detailed Feedback is a Primary Motivator
Key Takeaways:
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Middle managers must rely on employee engagement to deliver results and keep teams motivated.
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Business must have have more managers thinking holistically and thinking about integration.
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AI technologies would be able to look at the patterns of interactions on Slack or other collaboration tools and provide coaching and feedback.
Engagement and inclusion are among the biggest motivators for employees when it comes to boosting productivity. Middle managers must rely on employee engagement to deliver results and keep teams motivated. Part of that process is now possible to automate thanks to generative AI. Apps like LEAD bot offer AI-supported virtual coffee chat and team watercolor options which help managers bring teams together and create a robust interconnection dynamic. This also helps in developing more candid workplace relations which, in turn, help managers navigate office bureaucracy more effectively.
As this McKinsey podcast on the role of AI for managers explains,
Gen AI can be incredibly powerful if you can give managers insight across all areas of the organization. What we need to do is have more managers thinking holistically and thinking about integration.
It further adds that,
We are seeing technologies that could potentially look at the transcript of a meeting and provide coaching on the tone of the meeting, on inclusiveness. These technologies would be able to look at the patterns of interactions on Slack or other collaboration tools and provide coaching and feedback. Generative AI could also help somebody coach through a mock feedback conversation.
In both instances, managers enable and include workers without blocking their calendars with one-on-one conversations. This helps generate better integration values across teams, especially remote working teams to boost business productivity.
Broad Performance Reviews Don’t Affect Motivation
Key Takeaways:
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Companies that do not cultivate a culture of nuanced and specific feedback tend to lose talent very quickly.
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Specific performance appraisal creates the ideal development ground for careers and boosts business productivity.
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Using AI-supported mentoring and mentoring options via collaboration apps like Slack, managers and team leaders cut down on the time taken up by these activities.
Performance measurement without a clearly defined metric is one of the worst ways to manage a team’s productivity output. Companies that do not cultivate a culture of nuanced and specific feedback tend to lose talent very quickly. This factor for business productivity is visible most easily in Gen Z workers. This generation wants to have meaningful work that starts from day 1. the best kind of new hire onboarding for Gen Z workers puts up a clearly defined career trajectory for the workers. Naturally, this translates into specific performance appraisal which then creates the ideal development ground for careers.
In fact, broad performance reviews without any context i.e. benchmarks such as pass or fail or numeric performance metrics have a negative correlation with motivation. Keeping employees motivated demands that their overall approach to productivity is curated with nuanced feedback. And doing this need not be something the manager must do. Using AI-supported mentoring and mentoring options via collaboration apps like Slack, managers and team leaders cut down on the time taken up by these activities. This enables them to focus on more goal-oriented tasks while employees work up their tasks with support from peers and assistance from AI modules.
5 Factors that Actually Work on Boosting Employee Motivation and Enhance Business Productivity
Skilled Managers Are the Element X
Key Takeaways:
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Managerial skill development has emerged as a primary element of business productivity growth.
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About 31% of companies are investing in skills development, in tandem with 29% shifting towards skills-based hiring.
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even though some people might be reluctant to engage in this type of behavior, emotional acknowledgment, asking people questions about their emotions, validating their emotions, we find consistent evidence over, and over, and over that people really appreciate this type of acknowledgment.
Not surprisingly, managerial skill development has emerged as a primary element of business productivity growth. As the middle line of business, managers are in the unique position of liaising between executives and workers, they must also get training to do it well. The changing dynamics of employment and expectations demand that managers receive regular training as well as career updating opportunities. Here’s a Fortune article explaining details on talent-driven business productivity and how manager training matters,
About 31% of companies are investing in skills development, in tandem with 29% shifting towards skills-based hiring. But the report shows they’re investing equally—or even more—in ways to solve their labor problems externally—29% are looking to hire more staffers and 36% are spending to add employee benefits and perks.
In addition, managers can also do with emotional quotient training as this HBR ideacast podcast explains,
So we find in a lot of research, shows that people are hesitant to even engage with people’s emotions. There’s some research that shows in conflict, 90% of the time, managers avoid actually engaging with emotions at all. They say, “It’s one of the hardest things we have to manage.” We’re consistently finding that even though some people might be reluctant to engage in this type of behavior, emotional acknowledgment, asking people questions about their emotions, validating their emotions, we find consistent evidence over, and over, and over that people really appreciate this type of acknowledgment. They want people to see what they’re feeling, to be heard, and for people to be interested in how they’re feeling in the workplace.
Business productivity relies heavily on creating team synergy between teams, departments, and different office locations. Developing managerial talent is a strong way to enable employees as well. Good managers know how to bring the best out of their team and create the ideal foregrounding for the company’s future. This is why employee engagement activities conducted by well-placed managers stand apart in their efficacy for generating business productivity and employee loyalty.
How Should You Pursue Your Company’s Employee Motivation Campaigns?
Motivating employees demands working integrally with team leaders and managers to execute a cohesive vision for the company. The best business leaders create business value by putting broad visions into workable goals week after week, month after month, and quarter after quarter. They also create strong feedback loops that engage their employees with managers playing a crucial buffer for enabling employee talent development programs. This is where the LEAD bot helps organizations develop a work culture that leverages its best assets for business productivity and success.
LEAD bot is a team engagement platform for big businesses and MNCs on Slack and Teams. It is an all-in-one team development software with features like virtual coffee chats, buddy programs, birthday celebrations & work anniversary celebrations, new hire onboarding programs, and Pulse Surveys.
LEAD bot also offers cutting-edge Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) for large-scale organizations. C-suite execs and mid-level managers benefit greatly in their decision-making from ONA and use its highly actionable insights for building strong connections across their workforce. This enables far more forward-leaning talent development and generates greater organizational interconnectedness! Foster better organizational health, talent development, employee retention, and overall performance with this simple app!
LEAD.bot is a product of LEAD.app and we also LEAD.bot’s sister app Sunrize which showcases workplace attendance by graphs right on Slack! Book a demo now!
