Want Your Employees To Try Harder? Here’s How To Do It.

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2 June 2022. Have you been observing your employees and wishing that they would try a little harder? If this is the case, then you need to be looking at what you can do to encourage this kind of work ethic in your team. Sometimes, the problem is a lot closer to home than you might think, which is why you always need to assume that this is a possibility, rather than dismissing it outright. In this article, we’re going to be taking a look at some of the things that you can do if you want your employees to try harder, and how you can accomplish this goal. Keep reading down below if you would like to find out more.

Motivate them

The first thing that we are going to say is that you should work on motivating them. In the same way that everyone else needs motivation to do things at times, your employees will need this same treatment. How you choose to do this is up to you though, so you’ve got to come up with some ideas that you think will really provide the motivation needed to get things done. You know your team better than anyone else, so you are the one who knows what will do this.

If your first thought there was to sit next to them and tell them that they can do it without really offering anything by way of motivation other than an encouragement, you need to head back to the drawing board. There are some bosses out there who argue that the paycheck employees receive should be enough motivation, but we’re not talking about employees who aren’t working altogether. We’re focusing on people who are working, but just aren’t giving it all that they have got. You need to be the one to motivate them to work as best they can, not just scraping through with the bare minimum.

Guide them

As the business owner and their boss, you also need to be guiding them. Essentially, you are a mentor in one way or another to everyone who works for your business. Even if you don’t work directly with everyone in your business, you are the one that they are following and you are the one that they come to work for each morning. The ones that you do work with directly should be receiving your guidance, helping them to build a career rather than just having a job. It can be rough out there on the market, and you have the experience needed to guide your employees in the right kind of direction depending on what their goals are.

If someone in your business comes to you for guidance, whether it’s on the project that they are working on or in their general career, you should be providing this. If you think about it, the closer the relationship that you are able to cultivate with employees, the more likely they are to work hard for you, ensuring that everything is done to the highest possible standard.

Help them

If someone in your business needs help, why would you stand by and ignore this? It’s true to say that helping people is just a part of being the boss, so if you’re not doing this, you need to make some changes as soon as possible. We know that you are busy, and we know that you have a million things on your plate right now, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t take the time to lead from the front and help the people you employ. Sometimes, certain tasks or projects are extremely tricky, and they are going to need the expertise that you have to help them get through it. There’s nothing wrong with this, and you trying to leave them to figure it out on their own is not going to help.

Of course, there are times where people need to stand on their own two feet, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be all the time. It’s perfectly okay to need help and to not be able to do something if it is out of the ordinary for that employee, or if it’s extremely tough.

Use incentives

Using incentives is another thing that you can try when it comes to getting your employees to work harder. Offer them something, make it worthwhile to work as hard as possible for your company. It’s true to say that every single person on the planet works better when they think that there is a prize or something in it for them in the end. We recommend using something like an employee engagement platform to keep an eye on all the things that are going on, and ensure that the right people are rewarded. This kind of reward platform allows you to know what’s going on at any given time, and give the right rewards to the right employees.

We guarantee that as soon as you introduce incentives, the productivity and efficiency of your business is going to go through the roof. It doesn’t matter if this is an early finish one day, if it’s a little prize that you have bought or whatever else, the idea of something being at the end of the road is good enough to push people to work harder.

Conduct employee performance reviews

If you really want to get them working harder and you have tried other, nicer methods, one of the things that you can do is conduct employee performance reviews. Make these random so nobody knows when they are coming, and just conduct them whenever you feel like it. This way, you will see them working as they normally do, not just the act that they are putting on simply because they know that they are being watched.

A similar kind of experiment has been conducted in the past that concluded that if people think that they are being watched, or they are not sure if they’re being watched, they will always act as if they are, just in case.

Make it a competition between employees

The final thing that we are going to say is that you can make it a competition between your employees, between departments, between teams or however you want to do this. There is nothing wrong with a little bit of healthy competition, so why not encourage it? It will certainly give them the kick that they need to try a little harder and work a little harder for your business. You can try things like setting goals and whoever reaches the goal first wins for example. You can offer incentives as part of this, but you don’t always have to for it to work effectively.

You might not want to have competitiveness in your business, but it will give you the results that you need if you can create a healthy environment while doing it.

We hope that you have found this article useful, and now see some of the things that you can do if you want your employees to try harder. As the business owner, it’s your job to do whatever you can to get your employees where they need to be and sometimes this means looking at what your options are when it comes to helping. Take the advice that we have laid out above, and you should find that your employees start doing better sooner rather than later. We wish you the very best of luck.

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