Ways to motivate people without talking about financial gains

 

There are always ways to motivate, appreciate and provide recognitions apart from financial gains. At high level, it looks challenging and below article has some of these points.

I have tried to divide these ideas into two parts, one, which may not require the organization policy changes and second, which require support from organization or at some level policy change.

No change in organization policy – Certainly managers can adopt some ways to motivate team without making any financial impact to organization as well as no policy change. These are as follow:

Encourage and appreciate the good work

Many leaders avoid praising small wins and appreciating small achievements.  However, regular appreciations and recognitions of good work motivates the resources and encourages others to follow. During daily or weekly meetings, say some good words to your team members, who has done excellent work last week. People always remember small gestures and token of appreciations.

Allow resource to grow and learn

 If you are working on technical/software project, you find many challenging situations, where you have to find the solutions. You know that your team does not have that skill; you may want some of your team members to learn it. So allow them to take the challenge and explore. Allocate some time for their learnings. This is going to motivate your team and they would love to work more for you. Send your resources to trainings and make a training plan align with your organization training plans. Give them opportunities so they can learn new things.

Encourage your team to choose their strategy

There are situations, where people follow strict guidelines and fixed rules. In fact, some managers have their own way to doing certain things, allowing your team or resources to follow their approach and complete the task gives encouragement to team and resources. This develops a kind of trust and reliance within team. This motivates people.

Adopt ways to motivate people, where organization policy change is required. There are ways to motivate people apart from financial gains, which may require organization policy changes. These are as follows:

Allow to work in flexible timings

Project Leads clearly know, who the best performers are and who can work more dedicatedly and happily in project. Most committed people on project spend more than average time over the project; they try to give as much as possible. You really want them to be productive all days.  Allowing them to come little late on any day would help them to recover the stress. This small step can help in motivating such resources. No doubt, there are organization policies and no one wants to break the rules so discuss with your HR and find a way to implement it

Giving time-off short leaves after a major delivery

After working on a tight deadline and completing the tasks, everyone would love to have a time-off or a short break. This helps people to rejuvenate and enjoy after the hard work they have put in. People do take leaves for their personal work and many traditional leaders would put this argument but time is changing so the ideas of motivation and appreciation. I am sure a short leave should not affect the schedules and delivery of projects. Think about it and discuss with your HR to find better ways to implement it.

I hope you found this topic helpful and beneficial. Your comments are welcome to refine these ideas.