Here at Baillie Lumber, we place great value on motivating and rewarding our high performers. These teams and individuals can be found throughout our organization, from our skilled lumber traders and yard managers to employees in traffic and accounting and the many skilled employees at our sawmills. We strive to recognize the qualities these individuals possess, and to nurture and strengthen their work ethic.
Here are methods we found helpful to keep in mind when looking to boost the performance in your business:
Encourage team members to “own” their jobs. No one is really satisfied just being a cog in the wheels of an organization. Employees are motivated when they feel engaged in their work.
When you “limit someone’s ability to ‘own’ the job by dictating to them what they can and can’t do, you have already lost,” notes Small Business Bonfire. By “including them in the creation” of their job responsibilities, it’s likely they will be “more motivated to take ownership of their role in your business.”
Check-in with employees on a regular basis. Sometimes a lack of communication leads to an absence of motivation. In businesses where managers and others on the executive team actively communicate with team members, productivity is often higher.
Business 2 Community encourages businesses to schedule ongoing one-on-ones with employees “even if they are for a short period of time to gauge employee motivation levels.” To ensure that every employee feels valued, it may be necessary to “put in some degree of effort on each individual employee before your efforts turn into viable results.”
Promote the exchange of ideas. Often, customer-facing staff and those in the field have a better grasp on customer needs and pain points than others within the organization. Invite these and other team members to offer their creative ideas on how to improve product or service quality, as well as ways to enhance customer relationships.
Some suggestions may not hit the mark, but when they do, it’s important to act on them and implement tangible changes. This, in turn, will motivate team members to be more actively engaged in operations.
Remove bureaucratic obstacles. In some organizations, employees begin losing motivation when they encounter too much red tape or multiple layers of bureaucracy. Wherever possible, streamline the decision-making process (while encouraging employee input) and eliminate barriers that get in the way of making things work. Team members will likely feel more motivated when it seems they’re no longer coming up against the same obstacles again and again.
Celebrate and reward achievement. Never let an opportunity pass to celebrate and reward your employees’ hard work. You can recognize individual and/or team accomplishments in a public setting, such as an all-staff meeting. You can also host team-building activities, onsite or offsite, that are more about fun than work. When employees get together in an informal setting, they bond together, and motivation grows stronger. They see how working together at peak performance helps everyone involved.
No business succeeds for very long with unmotivated employees. Your challenge is to provide resources and reward achievements so that each team member feels valued and incentivized to always strive for higher performance and productivity. In these situations, everyone wins!
Brett Del Prince
Baillie Lumber
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