Motivated employees are more productive, higher achieving, and more in tune with company goals and business outcomes. However, with more employees working from home and an increase in hybrid work models, keeping your staff motivated is more challenging than ever.

If you’re looking to build a highly motivated team in this evolving work environment, we’re here to help. In this article, you’ll find expert-backed insights and advice to support and encourage your team, regardless of their physical work location.

How to motivate your employees

1. Provide a clear mission statement and set of goals

As a leader, it’s essential that your team knows exactly what you’re working toward as a company. It helps them determine how well-aligned they are with your mission, and how they can appropriately situate themselves within your company to find fulfillment. Providing clear annual goals helps them focus their work and feel like they’re productively and impactfully serving the team.

2. Ensure your team is working toward their “why”

It’s important to know what your employees are hoping to achieve so that you can best align their work with their motivation. No matter their title, there are likely opportunities to focus their tasks, training, or team collaboration to make their work as fulfilling as possible. Your business will undoubtedly benefit from the effort.

3. Create opportunities for your team to recharge

While work is the most important part of a job, the best way to ensure your team is operating at its highest level is to provide adequate opportunities to rest and recharge. This could mean establishing a workplace culture that visibly values breaks, vacations, and individual well-being, or planning staff retreats or events that allow team members to come together, bond, and unwind.

4. Foster professional development

Learning new information to improve job performance is an essential motivator for many employees. Consider technology training, conferences, or workshops that could advance your employees’ abilities or help them grow within their fields. And remember, learning from experts outside one’s field can often provide the best education.

5. Adjusting to meet employee needs

Since no two employees are the same, it follows that you need to be open to approaching staff motivation differently from one team member to another. Consider setting up goals for staff development and budgets to make staff enrichment possible, and be open to adapting them for different employees’ needs.. If you’re not able to have this hands-on approach with every member of your team, consider developing options rather than uniform proscriptions so staff can advocate for their best interest within their roles.

Motivating employees in the workplace starts with you

As a small business owner, you get to write the rules of how you run your company. Consider the advice of experts and researchers who have generated impactful, informative data on how to best identify and support employees’ unique motivation. Then spend some time carefully considering how you might use that information to create or restructure your small business.

While there is no uniform road map available to motivating your employees, getting in touch with who you want to be as a business owner and who the members of your team are is a great first step in planning your path forward. Make sure to communicate with your team to ensure they’re motivated. Then, get creative about how you can approach meeting staff and business needs with the resources at your disposal.