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Fire-Up Your Employees

Guest post by: Dave Ferguson

Article Overview: Do your employees need a boost of energy? Are they lacking motivation or inspiration? Could they use some fire underneath them? Sometimes motivational words just won’t cut it. Employees are looking for much more. Investing in the good ones can go a long way, today and in the future. If you can truly energize employees, they will drink the company kool-aid and your bottom line will be better off for it.

Fire-Up Your Employees

Do your employees need a boost of energy? Are they lacking motivation or inspiration? Could they use some fire underneath them? Sometimes motivational words just won’t cut it. Employees are looking for much more. Investing in the good ones can go a long way, today and in the future. If you can truly energize employees, they will drink the company kool-aid and your bottom line will be better off for it.

So why should you even care about energizing your employees? Here are a few critical reasons:

• To rebuild employee trust. All the downsizing, lay-offs, rightsizing, and re engineering has created environments where employees have lost trust.
• Employees today must be more self-motivated and self-directed.
• As our work environments have become more high-tech, the need for managers to be more high-touch has developed.
• Work environments today must be supportive and foster the desired behaviors and outcomes.
• All employees want to feel valued and appreciated for their knowledge, skills, and their work.
• Managers have limited time with their employees, so it must be positive and meaningful

So, how do you truly energize your employees? Try these four ways to begin with:

• What and how you communicate with your employees is just as important as what you pay and give them. Well-informed employees are good and productive employees, simply because they feel involved. The positive effects of communicating vital company information to employees are huge. Employees who are “in the loop” are energized and feel like a vital part of the organization.

• Involving your employees in decisions that affect them will result in overall better decisions. The collection of employee suggestions is one of the best ways to involve employees and to energize them in the process. Their suggestions can not only help the company but also themselves, by improving working conditions and giving them a measure of control over their jobs. If a company carefully reviews employee suggestions and quickly implements the ones with merit, management is sending a message to employees that they are valued.

• Training employees receive is essential for their long-term relationship with your company. The best companies recognize that teaching employees pays long-term dividends. When employees are given opportunities to learn and better themselves, it can electrify an otherwise stagnant workforce. Just the ability to break out of their day-to-day routines can be very energizing in itself.

• Creating new and interesting challenges can keep employees out of a rut. These new challenges can reenergize them and restore enthusiasm. If you want your employees to feel exciting about coming to work you’ve got to create interesting new challenges.

If you decide to consider some of what you’ve read here today, remember that people today are looking for much more than a paycheck when they go to work. Many employers still don’t get this and it shows in their production and turnover numbers. My suggestion is to give your employees a chance to make impact, not just a job. Fire them up!

Have a great week.

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Article Tags: accountability, bottom line, business, coaching, employees, finances, inspiration, leadership, money, motivation, success, training



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