Money isn’t always honey when it comes to keeping employees engaged at work!

1. Passion: If you’re not excited about work, why should anyone else be?

 As the novelist E.M. Forester once said, “One person with passion is better than 40 people who are merely interested.”

• Are you adding positive energy to the project/idea/workplace, or are you sucking the energy out of the room through apathy, or worse, energy-draining behaviors and language?  
• How would you rate the overall energy level in your workplace?
  • Are you communicating with passion? Not fake passion, but genuine interest and enthusiasm
  • Do you say “Yes” more often that you say “No”?
  • Are you the first to step up to the old plate?
  • Do you know what your team’s top three passions are?
  • Do you know what your employees are truly passionate about, both inside and outside of work?
  • Can you tap into your fellow employees’ personal passions and make use of them in your workplace?
  • Do your employees have the chance to work on something at least once a week that they are truly passionate about?
  • What are you doing to actively demonstrate your passion about your workplace vision and goals?

2. Purpose: A powerful sense of purpose leveraged with intense passion is one of the most powerfully motivating forces  
   

• Does every employee understand exactly why your organization exists?
• When dealing with lots of change at work, do you explain and continually sell why the change is necessary?
• Are you connecting everyone’s work with the bigger picture, and helping them see why their work matters and how it contributes to the overall vision and mission?
• Are you aligning your purpose with your hiring, training, and coaching?
• Open your meetings with a brief: “Why we are here today?” moment to remind people of the purpose of the meeting
• Does everyone clearly understand why their team exists?
• Does everyone understand why the project they are working on matters?
• What stories can you tell that will help make an emotional connection to a greater sense of purpose?
• Hold an annual family open house to remind employees why they work
• Create a wall of family photos to remind employees why they work
• Create a “Dream Wall” with photos that reflect people’s personal passions to remind them why they work
• Share and celebrate everyone’s “big dreams” both inside and outside work to help connect people to a great sense of purpose and create awareness that might help them achieve their big dreams
• What are you actively doing to shift employees from a “job” mindset, where they view their work only as a way to make money, to a “calling mindset,” where employees feel rewarded and challenged by the work itself, not just the external rewards?
• When you tackle a new problem or challenge, ask “Why” five times to make sure you are getting to the real root cause, the real source of the issue
• What can you do to communicate your organization’s vision and purpose in outrageous ways?

3. Progress: When visible progress is made towards a powerful sense of purpose, it’s easy to get passionate about the journey you’re undertaking  
   

• Continually ask and answer the question: “How will we know we’ve made progress?”
• Create a giant scorecard that highlights your major milestones and progress
• Map out a plan as to how you will communicate and celebrate each milestone
• Send out a brief monthly progress report on key initiatives
• Hold a team huddle at the end of the week to review the progress made in key areas
• Hold a monthly team huddle to show the progress
• Help everyone understand and see their potential career paths for advancement
• Create fun rituals linked to milestones or sales: for example, every time someone makes a sale over $_____, you hit a giant gong
• Offer training that will give employees a sense of moving forward with their key skills and talents
• Continually adjust workloads/goals so that employees feel challenged, not overwhelmed
• Take the time to figure out how different aspects of an employee’s job can be measured—this isn’t always easily done, but is has a huge payoff in terms of motivation
• Create a “Where we began” scrapbook, video, or booklet to give employees a sense of the progress and changes over the years
• Create a “Where are we going?” scrapbook, video, or booklet to show the path
• Share all the financial numbers so that everyone sees the progress in financial terms as well
• Create a progress plan at the end of each meeting: answer the basic questions when a new idea is decided upon: Who will do it and When will it be done?
• When brainstorming or asking for employees’ input, start with the small stuff, the “low hanging fruit,” so people get a sense of immediate progress
• Constantly communicate and celebrate the “small wins” no matter how small they may feel
• Start a daily journal and record three, no matter how small, three things you are grateful for; three small wins: This is proven to be one of the biggest single boosters of happiness levels     
  

4. Pride: An intense sense of pride both comes from and fuels progress toward a compelling purpose   

• Intrinsic, internal motivators, such as a feeling of pride, are longer lasting and far more powerful than any external motivator
• Create a list of all the things about which you and your employees can be proud . . .
  • Your culture?
  • The values for which your organization stands?
  • Your sense of vision or mission?
  • Your team?
  • Your product or services? What specifically?
  • Your talents? Your relationships?
  • Your customer service?
  • Your public image?
  • Your social or environmental contributions?
  • Your character? What specifically?
  • Your ability to overcome obstacles and impossible odds?
• Studies show that praising effort, not just raw talent, creates a bigger, more sustained pay off by setting up a “learning mindset” where employees feel they can learn, grow, and continually improve vs. a “fixed mindset” where they feel they cannot learn new things, adapt, or grow
• Are you creating a culture that recognizes the value of praise?
• The most effective praise is: 100% positive, timely, specific, and sincere
• Stockpile thank-you notes to make it easy to write hand-written notes of praise and encouragement
• Look for creative ways to say thanks: Add a special thanks note onto their pay check, leave thank-you notes on Post-It notes, put up a sign of thanks in the washroom
• Send thank-you cards and gifts to the families of employees to really wow your employees and tap into their pride
• Hold a family open house for employees to boost the pride factor
• Hold internal team “show and tell” days
• Do your business cards convey a message of pride? (And does everyone in your organization have a business card? If not, what message are you sending?)
• Start a file of your employees’ spouses and children’s names, their birthdays and interests
• Start a file to keep track of your employees’ interests and passions so you can tailor small gifts of appreciation to them effectively
• Hold an end-of-week team huddle to celebrate the top 3 highlights of the week
• Leave a Monday morning voice mail message of thanks and encouragement on everyone’s voice mail as a way to start the week on the right foot
• Create an annual or scrapbook of accomplishments for the year
• Encourage employees to get involved in charities
• Create team events that contribute to a local charity
• Create a “Why we like it here” video using different employees
• Make use of people’s personal talents at work
• Celebrate the anniversary dates of when employees started with your organization
• Celebrate employees’ personal accomplishments: Have they climbed their first mountain, ran a marathon, or contributed significantly to a charity?
• Hold a “show and tell day” for departments to show off what their work
• Create referral cards for employees to give out to perspective new hires
• Hold a fun awards ceremony, mimic the Oscars, and in addition to the more serious awards, mix in some plain fun ones: Best Sense Of Humor, Most Likely to O.D. on Caffeine, Wackiest Tie Collection, Least Likely to be Voted Off the Island . . .
• Celebrate your “Workplace Heroes” with a “Going the Extra Mile” award
• Create a “Going the Extra Inch” award for small ideas that can be implemented on a regular basis
• Make a list of your “unsung heroes” that tend to get left out of things and create special programs that recognize and reward them for their efforts
• Capture your corporate history from your veterans: record their stories, triumphs, and funny anecdotes
• Have a “Pass the Bouquet” day where everyone passes a bouquet of flowers from desk to desk over the course of a week to thank people for different things  
• Create a large symbol, such as a giant stuffed animal, that gets passed on to people as a public show of thanks
• Create a “kudos” page in your newsletter
• Create a “kudos” board in a prominent hallway
• Create a file/board/binder/booklet showcasing customers’ letters of thanks and praise
• Celebrate the anniversary date of your organization’s founding
• Look for unusual ways to recognize employees: Name a hallway, stairwell, meeting room, or cafeteria dish after them!
• Open meetings by publicly praising someone who has done something noteworthy
• Create a special fund that employees can dole out to co-workers over the course of a year as a special bonus thanks for going above and beyond
• Use your employees in training, on videos, in marketing campaigns
• Ask employees for input on a regular basis: this shows you value their judgment and their experience; it’s one of the most powerful ways to tap into a person’s pride
• Send employees on different training opportunities
• Have a dedicated section in every meeting where everyone goes around the table and offers recognition of someone’s accomplishment
• Listen for employees’ ideas and then turn them into action as quickly and as often as possible! Nothing is more motivating than seeing your ideas turned into action!
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5. Play: When you feel passionate about something, and take pride in your progress towards a compelling purpose, then work begins to feel like play  
   

• “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” Arthur Toynbee
• As the “Fun Theory” from Sweden demonstrated through its musical, piano escalator, and photo radar lottery system, you can change behaviors by making it FUN for people to do so
• Create a more fun, relaxed atmosphere to encourage creative thinking, help people relax, and put everyone in a more positive frame of mind
• Create friendly competition among teams
• Get creative and figure out ways of turning mundane, repetitive task into a competition or mental game
• Remove barriers to work, processes or behaviors that drain the sense of fun at work

6. Personal: The final piece of the puzzle happens when you connect employees’ personal life and work passions to a greater sense of purpose. When you make them feel proud in a way that is meaningful to them, when you demonstrate and celebrate their individual progress, and when you encourage them to play in a way that works best for them; tremendous, inspiring accomplishments will be achieved!    

• Work affects our personal lives, our marriages, our stress levels, our identity, our use of time, our attitudes, our health, our happiness, and our sense of accomplishment and purpose, so never lose sight of the fact that work is intensely personal
• Different strokes for different folks, so forget the “golden rule” that says you should treat other people the way you’d like to be treated because maybe someone else doesn’t have the same motivational triggers as you!
• Although everyone is motivated to different degrees by the 5 Ps above, you still need to treat everyone as individuals and find their unique “on switches” and “off switches”
• The “on switches,” things that motivate people, aren’t necessarily just the opposite of “the off switches” (things that de-motivate employees); they are often completely different sets of lists, so you need to work on identifying both!
• com survey found that 49% of dog owners said they would switch jobs if they could bring their dog to work with them: Find the hidden triggers in your workplace!
• Conduct “What will make you stay?” interviews instead of “Exit interviews”
• Get to know the person behind the job title: spouse’s name, kids’ names, kids’ hobbies and birthdays, personal interests, and passions
• Offer rewards that contribute/encourage an employee’s charity of his/her own choosing, not just your corporate charity
• Find out the root source of employees’ motivation. Sometimes it’s not about the pay or the corner office, but what the pay raise and corner office represent

 

Michael Kerr is a Canadian Hall of Fame Speaker, highly in-demand international keynote speaker, and the creator of the Culture Leadership Online Academy. Michael is also the author of 8 books, including:  The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank;  Hire, Inspire, and Fuel Their Fire; and The Jerk-Free Workplace: How You Can Take the Lead to Create a Happier, More Inspiring Workplace.  www.MikeKerr.com