What do your supervisors know about challenging employees as a way of motivating employees in your organization? You can convey the following information to supervisors regarding challenging employees as a way of motivating employees in your organization:
For a Limited Time receive a
FREE HR Report "Top 10 Best Practices in HR Management." This comprehensive special report will give you the information you need to know about these current HR challenges and how to most effectively manage them in your workplace.
Download Now Not all jobs are extremely interesting. But if you wish to motivate your workers and keep them involved in their work, you must try to make every job, even the most routine tasks, more interesting. There are many ways to do this, among them:
- Challenge employees to find better, more efficient ways to perform routine jobs;
- Cross-train and rotate less interesting jobs when possible. Even a dull job is more interesting when it is new to an employee;
- Broaden an employee’s responsibilities to include planning, problem solving, quality control, or other more challenging aspects of the job sequence;
- Or, form workers into a team and make the team responsible for an entire operation or project from start to finish. Let them decide how the work is divided and how it is done, as long as desired results are achieved on schedule.
- Another effective way to motivate employees through challenge is to expose them to new experiences. New experiences are always interesting, whether or not we like them. When people are exposed to work they haven’t done before, they are forced to think and act in new ways, which is ultimately stimulating, satisfying, and growth inducing.
- Problem solving is also a great motivator. People like to fix things, solve puzzles, or make things work. We do this in our personal lives all the time. It’s a skill that is easily transferred to work, and it is perhaps the most self-reinforcing motivator of them all. Once employees have been given a chance to solve a problem, they often look forward to tackling another one.
- Although most employees will welcome challenges, some may be intimidated at first. They may express a desire to stick with the safe and familiar. For some of these people, you may need to rely on other motivators. But others may just be cautious or afraid of failure. You can bring these people along slowly, giving them challenges they feel they can handle, gradually increasing the difficulty and importance of the challenge.
The above information comes from BLR’s presentation ‘Motivating Employees: Tips and Tactics for Supervisors’. For more information on all the training courses BLR has to offer, go to our Employee and Manager Training page.