Which employee works best? The answer is obvious: the one who can and wants to work. With the first point, skills, everything is more or less simple: to understand whether a person understands his business or not, it is enough to ask him a few questions about his specialty. With motivation, everything is much more complicated – even a very cool professional can show himself as a lazy and procrastinator, subject to professional burnout, which is almost useless.
Today we will talk about how to increase motivation in the team through self-motivated employees, self-starters.
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Who are Self-Starters? And what is “self-motivation” anyway?
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So, you want to motivate your employees to take on new heights… and they don’t. In general. Somebody burned out. Someone is good enough, everything is enough, there is no desire for career growth. Someone else just does not have enough self-confidence. What to do? Look for those who want (or those who may want) to move on.
Such people – employees, who do not need to be motivated or just a little push – are called Self-Starters, “self-motivated”. They are:
- Feel obliged to do something without constant supervision from the manager;
- They are willing to master new methods of work, solve unfamiliar tasks;
- Facing problems, actively looking for solutions, easily adapt to changes.
Such specialists spend part of their free time studying or solving particularly interesting work tasks. In general, they are absolutely perfect – and make others perfect.
Modern practice shows that it is enough to have one “self-motivated” in your team for a dozen employees, and the rest will get stronger in time. Self-starters infect others with their enthusiasm, motivate them with their successes, make the whole team much more efficient… of course, if you let them open up.
“Sleeping” self-starters
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If we take any small/medium business and look at its team, in 9 out of 10 cases we will not see a single employee that fully matches the portrait described above. This happens because in order to become a self-motivated specialist it’s not enough to have the right inclinations – there must be an appropriate environment.
A person may be genuinely passionate about his work, but in practice he will face many problems:
- Boring routine. Many profile specialists – programmers, engineers, designers, etc. – Sincerely like their main business, but they can not stand the paper routine. Over time, the initial enthusiasm fades, the man in the subconscious is constantly tormented by the thought: “I’ll finish the project, I have to write reports. From a self-starter, it turns into a procrastinator;
- Lack of support. ” – I have a cool idea! – Listen, now very busy, deadlines are burning, let’s go with the novelties later? ». A person will come once, will come twice, and on the third will not offer anything;
- Non-acceptance by colleagues. “What do you want most of all? ». The problem is especially acute for companies with a clear KPI – employees are afraid that because of enthusiasm they will raise their performance (and, let’s be honest, they are often right). Even if dislike does not translate into open aggression, being in a negative environment for you all the time is an extremely depressing experience.
Surrounded by such problems, Self-Starter quickly “falls asleep”: it loses its motivation and becomes one of the gray masses. The energy itself and the desire to do something are not lost, so the sleeping self-starters become the most inveterate procrastinators. They are accustomed to reading the news, communicating in dozens of social networking windows at once, sitting for hours in online games – in general, do what they are passionate about. Your task here is to switch such passion back to work.
Important: Self-Starter usually gets its negative experience from the first job, and then brings it to all the following positions. Therefore, it is important to look not only at current employees, but also at each newcomer.
How to “wake up” a self starter?
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So, you have two tasks: to find self-motivated employees and help them open up. Let’s solve them in order.
Looking for a self-starter
Observe. Observe your people as closely as possible, learn what and how they do, but so that they do not feel this attention. Monitask employee monitoring system is perfect – it collects all the statistics you need and does it completely discreetly.
Pay attention to the following indicators:
- Efficiency spikes. If an employee solves half of the tasks but jumps above his head when working on the other half of the tasks, this is a clear signal: the person is self-motivated for at least part of the activity;
- High activity. Does the specialist have time to cope with the work, to check the social networks and to exchange news in the smoking room? There is plenty of energy in it!
- Ability to influence. There are employees who quickly infect the team with their mood, and this applies to both negative and positive cases. If you have an employee who changes the indicators of all the others in your office (no matter which way), it means that this is a strong person who can take responsibility for his actions.
And in general, any dynamics is important, especially negative ones. Someone enthusiastically took up the case, but then the indicators began to fall? Immediately, the maximum attention to such a person.
What exactly should be done to support self-motivation?
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Three simple tips:
- Encourage enthusiasm. Does a person like to do something? Give him the opportunity to do it as much as possible, and always throw something new so that there is no stagnation. Earlier we wrote why it’s important to encourage employees;
- Clean up everything that is superfluous. The less routine that distracts you from the main thing, the easier it will be to keep your employees self-motivated. You can automate the same daily/weekly task reports through Monitask working hours reports. The amount of business correspondence can most likely also be reduced. And so on;
- Pay attention to people. Support from your bosses is always very important for the enthusiast. You see that the employee does a lot and with pleasure? Praise him, write an award – show that you appreciate it. Does the specialist have new ideas? Discuss, think about implementation, give him/her the opportunity to do it.
This is the beauty of self-motivation: people do not like to be bored. Give them the opportunity to do interesting things, remove obstacles from the road, and you will be surprised at the results. And there, looking at the self-starter, the rest of the staff will pull up.
