5 Best Ways to Motivate Employees
After overseeing intense screening processes, your HR department definitely deserves a pat on the back after a successful hire. However, we all know their responsibility is far from over at this point.
On average, new employees need up to six months just to feel that they’re part of the family. New faces. New office. New routine. It’s no surprise if the fresh hire’s thoughts are running wild with all the anxiety and pressure. Your job? Drive the on-boarding process shorter alongside making them believe that they got this.
That’s easier said than done, so let’s walk you through the five best ways to motivate your new employees.
1. Give them a sense of purpose
Whenever you’re in an uncharted territory with nothing but your survival instincts as a companion, what’s the smartest thing to do first? Right, you have to get a hold of your bearings! Rushing to get food or water without even knowing which way is east or west is a free ticket for trouble.
Similarly, you can’t expect your new hire to go on a full work mode on day one. To help him adjust, the best you can do is to give him a sense of direction. A purpose.
You can do this by making sure to tick all of the items on this checklist:
- Recruits know their primary duties, daily deliverables, and standard operating procedures
- Recruits understand why their duties matter, and what can possibly happen without them
- Recruits are aware of how their efforts contribute to the overall success of their department
Traditionally, these points are covered in face-to-face induction processes. All recruits will spend a day or two in orientation activities about the must-knows in the company. A series of 50-slide lectures. Maybe a quick chat with the big bosses too.
Let Induct For Work help you upgrade your old, boring induction. With our e-learning system, you can take orientations out of the conference room and right beneath your employee’s fingertips. In just one dashboard, you can easily upload your company briefer, policies, procedures, and other materials essential to get recruits started. Instead of repeating the same lines over and over for each session, your executives can record their welcome speeches instead!
While they felt like initiates under strict surveillance before, your new employees now call the shots when and how to better understand their purpose.
2. Nurture them as individuals, not as programmable robots
You surely are familiar with the term “corporate slave.” Employees of some organisations burn out easily because of toxic, routinary days. Imagine if the only unpredictable thing about your work is if your boss will go full beast mode any minute now. The last thing you’d want is your new hire quitting halfway because he’s had enough.
To make sure recruits know and feel that you see them as actual people and not as automated robots, take note of the following goals:
- Recruits know that as much as they are considered assets of the company, their individual goals and values are given importance too
- Recruits are encouraged to take a break from office work, and to learn new hobbies and skills
- Recruits are aware of career opportunities they can get in your company if they work hard enough
While paid training and other travel benefits can break the bank, Induct From Work offers you a superb alternative. With varied packages to choose from, you can make unlimited courses available for an unlimited number of users. Whether you prefer quizzes, videos, or lecture slides – we got you! With a few taps and scrolls on their gadget, employees can acquire a new skill or expand their knowledge even at the comfort of their homes.
3. Create a healthy working environment
Maintaining a healthy work environment is pretty much similar to raising a family, but in an ultra hard mode. It’s great if your new recruit has top notch interpersonal skills, but the socially awkward ones can be a challenge to on-board. Different attitudes towards work. Contrasting beliefs. Even clashing forms of humour can spark office drama.
To ensure that your new hire will feel welcomed in the workplace that you exerted so much effort on to nurture, consider these milestones:
- Make recruits understand your company’s culture, values, and mission
- Create a profile of your recruits’ personalities, including their likes, dislikes, needs, and main motivations
- Set realistic expectations for new hires, and understand their preferred learning and working methods
To take some load off your back, leave it to Induct For Work to gather insights from employees and distribute accessible learning materials. Scrap the usual form printouts and customise online quizzes and surveys on your account instead! Even better, our platform supports multiple forms of uploads (e.g. photos, videos, documents, etc.) to accommodate different learning styles. It even has a text to voice feature that your auditory learners will surely love!
4. Monitor their progress
Remember, your goal is to shorten the six-month average on-boarding process. You can only start optimising if you have clear insights on your new employees’ performance and personal impressions. What parts of their job do they take the longest time to finish? Which company policy did they find most challenging to understand? Only when you flag the pain points of your induction can you start boosting its efficiency.
Try these methods to track how well your new recruits are doing:
- Take some time to watch them work firsthand. No better tool to use than your own eyes to check how the new receptionist is interacting with your customers.
- Ask recruits directly for a personal account on their accomplishments and encountered problems
- Give recruits access to self-monitoring tools like checklists, project plans, or to do lists
- Review recruits’ work in progress regularly
- Ask the people (e.g. office mates, customers, managers, etc.) that recruits usually interact with for feedback
If you used traditional face-to-face inductions, tracking your new hires’ progress can be one hell of a headache. It could take days or even weeks just to gather enough information, verify them, and extract useful conclusions. But with an online on-boarding process with Induct For Work, you can easily generate reports with just a few clicks. You can even customise them based on dates, departments, and other criteria. What’s more, you can access a detailed history log to verify if employees really worked or studied for as long as they claimed to.
5. Establish an open communication
It’s challenging enough for new hires to penetrate the cliques in your office and make friends, don’t make their lives harder by being so hard to talk to! Trust us when we say that recruits will feel optimistic if their superiors give them regular encouragement and feedback. An “open door” policy where even the newest employees can talk about their ideas can also make them forge a connection and sense of ownership to the company’s success, thus motivating them to be more productive than ever.
Let’s dive into four reasons why you should focus on improving communication within your company:
- Effective teams are built atop equally effective communication and collaboration strategies
- Employees’ sense of satisfaction and empowerment heavily rely on having a “voice” within the company
- Open communication of ideas is the best driving force for innovation and company growth
- Effective management (conflict resolution, delegation of tasks, etc.) is better achieved by a good communicator
To improve person-based communication tactics that you already have in place, you can count on Induct For Work’s notification streams. Repetitive reminders for unsubmitted tasks or documents, when left to managers, can be a breeding ground for subordinate-superior tensions. While it adds a whole new level of pressure to recruits, it also lessens your team leaders’ time for more valuable tasks. That’s why it’s wiser to leave that job to our automated e-mail and induction account notifications. We’ll also send a gentle nudge to your admin users for any pending issues. Even better, you’re assured that work feedback is tailor-fitted to each employee – thanks to Induct For Work’s advanced tracking and report generation functions.
Send us any questions or great tips to share? – Contact us here.
Induct for Work – the only system you need to create and manage online inductions in UK.
