As we continue through the summer, you will likely notice a decline in employee engagement and motivation. This global phenomenon may vary slightly depending on geographical location but is a common trend everywhere. The extended daylight hours, warmer weather, and kids being out of school to entice your staff to take additional days off and work less productively and focused, ultimately diverting attention from their work and driving their company’s goals. While sustaining employee engagement and motivation during the summer poses challenges, businesses can employ various influencing strategies to mitigate the impact on their bottom line and ensure continued success.
To help motivate your team, think about establishing credibility, gaining commitment, listening to your team, and building trust – all critical to creating a positive work culture. Here are a few core areas to consider:
Trust
Credibility leads to trust. When team members see their manager or leader as credible, they are more likely to trust their decisions and directions. Trust is fundamental to a positive and collaborative work environment.
Building trust doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, it is a complicated process that requires you to commit daily during interaction with your team members. By fostering a culture of trust, your team will buy into your decisions, stay motivated, and perform at a higher level. What makes a boss or employee trustworthy? You’re honest, genuine, sincere, respectful, and consistent.
Research has shown that a trusting environment at work leads to better collaboration, increased job satisfaction, and, in turn, higher performance. In contrast, lack of trust hinders productivity and motivation, makes your team members less likely to communicate about critical issues, and increases turnover as employees look for other teams and organizations that will offer a better environment.
Effective Communication
The best communicators are genuine, listen intently, are self-aware, and understand that communication is as much how you say something as it is what you say. Research by Dr Mehrabian of UCLA tells us that 7 percent of what you communicate is what you say, 38 percent is tone (how you say it), and 55 percent is body language. To influence and motivate others, this is critical. It’s not just about what you say on calls or write on your internal Slack or Teams group; it is the tone and timing of your communication, along with your body language, whether it be in 1-on-1 meetings with team members or in large groups, is critical and signals even more to the other party.
The rule of thumb for body language is consistency. Whether you’re evaluating your nonverbal cues or someone else’s, one signal isn’t enough of a red flag. Often, these gestures can be done without a person’s knowledge. However, observing a series of movements or gestures can indicate a resistance to communication. For example, someone crossing their arms might just be cold, but if that same person starts to point their body away from you, their smile fades, and they close their fist, then they likely aren’t too happy!
Engagement and Emotion
Our research over the last few decades has supported what Aristotle thought over 2,000 years ago – people make decisions emotionally and then justify them rationally. Therefore, you must tap into their emotions to influence and motivate people. Imagine a scenario where you are asked to save the company money by fast-tracking an internal project. It is more compelling for teammates to prioritize and complete a project with a quicker turnaround, knowing other people in the company are waiting on them to complete the task. Holding up others would make them feel guilty, and doing it on time or early would give them a sense of achievement and satisfaction. While saving the company money would be nice, it doesn’t directly impact their actions because it isn’t money directly out of their pocket.
Facilitating Action
Facilitating action is critical for any productive workforce member, not just leaders. Have you ever been in a meeting where action items and a deadline were mutually agreed upon, but the deadline wasn’t met a week later by fellow team members? Then, you can appreciate the importance and value of facilitating action. Facilitating action can be done in several ways: two of the easiest and most effective are providing options and creating a safety net. Providing options means giving another party approximately three options. Hence, they feel in control yet are not overwhelmed by too many choices or given too few, which can feel like an ultimatum. Creating a safety net is about removing some of the risks from making a decision. The most common example is the “money back guarantee” you see on any infomercial, but in business, that can be a warranty, trial period, pilot program, etc.
To influence your team—even colleagues over whom you do not have authority—it is critical to build credibility and trust, communicate effectively, engage them emotionally, and facilitate action. Following these tips, you can compel, motivate, and engage others, even during the summer when you must compete with going to the beach, traveling to Europe, or taking Airbnb staycations.
