Eight ways to turbo-charge your team’s performance

If you asked your staff, “What do you need right now that would make you perform better at work?” what would they say?

Founder of Refund Home Loans, Wayne Ormond knows his 40 staff well enough to be able to reel off a number of incentives that hit the mark.

For some, staff being able to start early and leave early means lower childcare bills. For other Refund Home Loans staff, particularly the Boomers, a good coffee machine for the company’s new head office fit-out is just the ticket.

Motivation levels within workplaces are universally poor if you take any notice of employee surveys. Global talent management firm SHL estimates 44% of staff feel unmotivated in their job.

But in an economy where business expectations are at a two-year low and 23% of businesses are recording lower earnings (March quarter 2011) according to Dun & Bradstreet data, line managers need to think laterally about how to inspire and motivate their teams.

The good news is, bosses can have a huge impact on staff motivation and boost company performance. Here’s some advice from a range of experts in the trenches.

Get creative about incentives, bonuses and perks

One way to tackle the problem is to eliminate factors that are stressing staff out to help them focus on the job. In the UK, utilities company E.on has just won the Grand Prix at the 2011 Employee Benefits Award for its program to help staff get out of debt and save for retirement.

The company discovered through its Employee Assistance Program (EAP) that financial stress was the number one reason for calls to the EAP helpline.

From there, E.on mapped out a financial wellbeing program for staff. The company built a series of sheds, called Headsheds, in public areas particularly for call centre staff to access. The sheds provide professional financial advice and support. Staff can also leave tips on the walls for colleagues.

The program has seen calls to the EAP drop from 80% to 40%. The lesson here is listening to staff and customising benefits make the difference.

Through staff consultation Wayne Ormond has discovered it is all sorts of small details that make a difference: the right office chair, a bigger fridge in the staff kitchen, even something as simple as natural light to work in.

Through LinkedIn, SmartCompany asked a range of business people what would motivate them right now at work and their feedback was extremely specific – from Alienware laptops, to better billing software, to better heating, through to creating a page on the company website with photos of all the staff. If you don’t ask…

Get rid of toxic staff

“Think of toxic employees as spreading like cancer,” says chief executive of Reputation.com Michael Fertik. “You can’t let a cancer metastasise due to non-treatment.”

Fertik is a prolific Twitterer, blogger and is a member of the World Economic Forum Agenda Council on Internet Security and recipient of the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2011 Award. He loves talking about the challenges of running businesses and says seeing others do a bad job sets a dangerous precedent.

A problem employee can cause varying degrees of pain to your company.

“Whether it’s a low-grade, constant pang or catastrophic, it’s usually far greater than you think,” says Fertik.

(For more support dealing with toxic staff, read the very useful No Naysayers Here: How to Fire a Toxic Employee and check your state’s unfair dismissal laws.)

Avoid patronising

There is nothing worse than fake praise to disengage staff. Fertik gave SmartCompany his formula for avoiding being that patronising boss.

• Talk straight, be open and transparent about your process.
• Involve people from all parts of the company and from all levels of experience in many or most decisions.
• Share ownership and credit for success.
• Be equally clear when people are coming up short.

Managing director of top coaching firm Hewsons International Joe Watkins understands just how critical management’s treatment of staff is to company performance.

“Managers have to develop themselves to be the kind of managers that see engaging with their people as valuable and important expressions of management,” he says.

“Your staff are a mirror of who you are towards them,” he says.

A lot of Hewsons’ coaching work centres around sorting out managers’ relationships with their teams. Hewsons has clients including BHP Billiton, Macquarie Bank and Austereo.

“You will get very different results of you treat staff like a bunch of slackers that want to get away with stuff rather than as able, great, confident people.”

Understand what motivates different generations of staff

In a blog for Harvard Business Review Managing and Motivating Employees in their Twenties, Fertik offered his tips for managing and motivating 20-somethings that include rotating high potentials through different parts of the company.

To get the best out of Gen Ys, he suggests managers “teach them how you think”, by taking the time to explain the decision-making process behind the company’s strategy. Some other tips for managing Gen Ys:

• Keep it short and sweet. Don’t be longwinded.
• Inspire.
• Set short-term goals and tight deadlines.

Fertik suggests daily goals and quick turnarounds can work well to boost performance in the demographic known for short attention spans.

Make everyone the CEO of something

“The biggest thing for us is giving people responsibility,” says architect Jad Silvester, director of Sydney business Silvester Fuller.

“You’ve got to give people the right amount of responsibility so that they feel they can contribute.”

Fuller takes a “bottoms up”, collegiate approach to projects, giving teams the opportunity to drive projects rather than being dictated too.

This allows for fresh ideas and perspectives into the work.

“We know that younger staff have energy and ambition and they have great ideas,” says Silvester.

In his brilliant TED lecture The Surprising Science of Motivation, Daniel Pink prescribes the following ingredients to empower staff:

• Autonomy: Give staff freedom to work on their own ideas and projects that could benefit the business. Google is most famous for this but Australian software firm Atlassian also does it.
•  Mastery: The desire to get better and better at something that matters is a powerful motivator. Offer kick-ass training, mentoring roles and time to complete higher studies.
•  Purpose: Make work meaningful. Tap into the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Says one Gen X recipient through our LinkedIn mini-poll: “I am motivated by the challenge of building something. I know that this may sound clichéd but it is the truth. To look back at an accomplishment and know that “I did that” is a real buzz. Perhaps it feeds my ego and that’s why it motivates me.”

Says Watkins says, “When people connect what they do with things that are important to them, they are motivated. It is as simple as that.”

Improve all aspects of communication

Communicating a lot and with plenty of depth means asking people to be truthful about whether things are working or not are essential to keeping staff engaged.

For Ormond, it always comes back to telling people what is happening in the business, telling staff what the individual plan is for them in the business.

Silvester Fuller’s employment philosophy and communication style is inspired by the diverse work experiences of Silvester and co-director Penny Fuller at internationally renowned architecture firms in Switzerland, the UK and Italy with the likes of Sir Norman Foster and Renzo Piano.

Working with people from all over the world with different cultural, educational and social backgrounds gave the pair a very handy skills set.

“You get very skilled at being able to communicate clearly,” he says.

Try some unusual but effective conversation starters:

• What is the dumbest thing you are working on?
• Let’s do a post mortem on that job.
• Where do you think the company is wasting time and/or money?

Remember money isn’t actually such a great motivator after all

In Blessingwhite’s 2011 Employee Engagement Report of more than 11,000 workers around the world, career development, new work opportunities and training turn out to be the big motivators. Dan Pink is adamant that financial rewards are not effective incentives for anything but the most basic tasks.

“It dulls thinking and blocks creativity,” he says. Based on his research of important experiments in social science on human motivation from the last 40 years, money doesn’t work as a motivator and, often, it is actually harmful.

“There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does,”

says Pink. In a London School of Economics Study of 51 pay-for-performance incentives schemes, the schemes had a negative impact on overall performance.

“Money is fine,” says Watkins, “but it doesn’t compensate for someone not being happy and feeling like they are not contributing.”

NEVER underestimate the value of positive feedback

It’s not rocket science. Recognise and thank people publicly, privately, personally. Throughout SmartCompany’s LinkedIn mini-poll, we kept hearing the same thing over again. People like hearing two words: “Great job”.