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Top Tips to Motivate a Small Team

motivate a small team

If you are a business owner with a small team working for you or a manager in charge of a tight-knit team, then you will want to get the absolute best out of your employees. It is a fact that highly motivated employees can be one of the key factors in any successful business. In fact, a study by the Harvard business review found that motivated employees can add an additional 47% to a company’s gross profits. Clearly, having highly motivated staff also encourages employee retention, which in turn reduces employee churn and related recruitment costs. This article explains three key ways in which leaders and employers can effectively motivate a small team to bring out their very best performance.

Offer remote working

Many employees will have experienced remote or hybrid models of working for the first time as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In America, 4.7 million employees now work remotely at least some of the time. In addition, 98% of workers want their employer to offer them remote or hybrid forms of work even when the pandemic is fully gone. Clearly, most workers see this as a beneficial change to their working worlds and want it to continue. 

For many workers, it allows greater control over their work-life balance, and this is a motivating factor that drives employees to perform at their best. While employers should encourage remote or hybrid models of working, they should also ensure that the IT infrastructure of their company is advanced and robust enough to foster effective working practices from remote settings. One way this can be achieved is to offer virtual desktop applications such as the Azure virtual desktop that is provided by IT specialists like   bridgehampton.io. Put simply, having a class-leading virtual desktop solution enables efficient and productive remote working practices.

Reward excellence

Another key way to motivate a small team is to reward success and excellence. It can be all too easy for managers and leaders to overlook smaller achievements as they may be more focused on wider corporate goals. However, it has been demonstrated that rewarding employees who go “above and beyond” to deliver exceptional quality work services to both motivate the employee who was responsible for the work and the wider team who seek to emulate the success of the high-achieving employee to receive similar recognition. Having staff awards ceremonies or “employee of the month” awards can be an effective way to motivate small teams.

Lead by example

Leaders and managers of small teams should be a highly visible presence in any workplace. It is a fact that actions speak louder than words in any organization, and so the conduct of such senior staff should serve as a demonstration of how employees should work. Some of the most successful leaders can motivate their employees by the intelligent allocation of tasks and projects that allow staff to be stretched but also to serve to demonstrate their growing skill sets and proficiencies. Great leaders should also be inspirational figures who have authority but are also highly approachable and are experts at active listening. In short, every successful company needs highly proficient leaders to drive increased levels of motivation in their teams.