“A person who is doing well is one who’s making lots of money. But a person who is doing good is making the world a better place. If you were forced to choose between the two, would you choose to do well, or to do good?” — Roy H. Williams
As a leader in your industry, motivating your team is more than a halfassed pep talk and an obnoxiously high sales quota that pushes them to make your company more money.
It’s about putting their needs first, even before your customers. It’s about showing them that you value them and support them – whether it be monetary incentives, recognition for their hard work, or simply listening to their ideas and feedback.
At the heart of it all, motivators are the key drivers that can help your team achieve success and drive results. They give your team a sense of purpose, encourage collaboration and teamwork, and instill a sense of pride in what they do each day.
And when you can motivate your employees, you’ll create a happy, healthy, wealthy culture. With a strong culture, you’ll find true freedom as a business owner to climb the ladder to exponential profitable growth.
While motivators certainly vary from person to person, there are certain techniques that you can use to effectively motivate your team and keep them engaged and motivated.
In this article, we’ll go over some of the most effective motivators for your team and how they make up the universal truths of our company culture.
What are Motivators?
Motivators are things that inspire people to take action. The fuel to their flame. It’s what makes your employees go from callously doing the bare minimum, to become star players and advocates for your company.
| EXTERNAL | INTERNAL | ||
| MOTIVATORS | DEMOTIVATORS | MOTIVATORS | ANTIMOTIVATORS |
| Pay | Insincerity | Identity | Fear |
| Power | Micromanagement | Purpose | Shame |
| Praise | Uncontrollables | Adventure | Guilt |
Motivators come with both a positive and negative resonance. Founded on the psychology of reward and punishment, there are times when it is necessary for each. The key is to understand the effect that each has in the perceptual reality of the people you are motivating, and to choose the one that best fits the situation for optimal morale.
Motivators can be internal or external, and they come from a variety of sources. Some common motivators include money, recognition, and rank. Internal motivators include a desire to improve one’s self or to help others. External motivators always come from outside of you, your heart, and your mind. Internal motivators always come from inside you, driving you, holding you back, motivating you, and scaring you.
Business leaders use motivators to inspire their teams and promote a positive work environment. Sadly, they also use them to punish, manipulate, and satisfy their own ego. By understanding what motivates, demotivates, and antimotivates your employees, you can create a system that encourages peak performance and job satisfaction.
Creating a happy, healthy, wealthy team doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of trial and error as well as radically honest communication. Once you find what works, it’ll be worth it to see your business —- and your employees — thrive.
At Wizard of Sales®, we can take all the guesswork out of building a motivated team.
Book a demo with us today to get started!
External Motivators
Pay
As anyone who has ever worked a day in their life can tell you, pay is among the most important motivators for employees.
While money may be something that many people fixate their efforts on, there are other areas of compensation that are more valuable to most employees than cash alone. These are time and energy.
Time is our most valuable commodity as it is a non-renewable resource, unlike money and energy. Time is what we work for. We also need the energy to be able to spend that time with family and friends or to just take some much-needed personal time to recharge our batteries.
In many cases, the worst cultures pay really well as some sort of compensation for long hours, compounding stress levels, and dead batteries outside of work.
When we show our employees that we value their time and energy too, we reinforce our company is a great place to work.
Power
Everyone strives to have a sense of power or control in their lives, and the same goes for employees at work.
It can be easy for newly promoted employees to get caught up in the idea that they are now in charge and have all the answers. Promotions can be a great opportunity for employees to learn and grow, but it is important for them to remember, just like Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.
Leaders must be taught how to use their power effectively, whether through mentorships, training, or coaching. With the right guidance, promotions can be a springboard for success rather than a source of failure.
Praise
Praise is a great motivator, but it’s important to use it in the right way. When aligned with genuine gratitude, praise can be a powerful tool to motivate employees.
However, praise can also be manipulative. It’s important to pay attention to how you use praise with your employees and make sure you’re not using it in a way that could take advantage of them.
There are several ways you can implement praise in the workplace, such as celebrating 5-Star Google reviews, peer-to-peer accolades, public scoreboards, and giving out bonuses and awards.
Whatever method you choose, pay attention that your praise is being perceived as genuine and well-intentioned. Your employees are only motivated when they perceive your praise as authentic.
External Demotivators
Insincerity
When praise is perceived as insincere, it counteracts even the best of intentions. While critical to only provide sincere and specific praise, preferably publicly, it is just as important to be attuned to your team.
Ensure your energy is vibrating at the same positive resonance as thiers. When it isn’t you’ll feel a negative vibe. A descent. Low morale. Disengagement.
Unlike the internally triggered motivators and antimotivators, demotivators rarely lead to a correction in desirable actions and behaviors. Therefore, as a leader, you are best advised to avoid them at all costs.
Micromanagement
Micromanagement is common practice in most workplaces today, despite being widely recognized as a demotivator and a leading cause of employee dissatisfaction and attrition.
At its core, micromanagement is driven by fear – the fear that an employee may fail or make a mistake, causing the manager to risk losing their position in the company hierarchy. As such, this irrational anxiety often results in managers focusing excessively on minor details and overzealously monitoring every aspect of an employee’s work, often in lieu of effective training.
However, while this approach may seem like it will help prevent mistakes and ensure success, it does just the opposite. By overly scrutinizing and controlling every action taken by employees, managers are effectively driving away great talent and leaving themselves at a greater risk for failure.
Uncontrollables
When you’re an employer, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers game. You want to see results and you want to see them quickly.
So, you set goals and KPIs and sales quotas, and then at the end of the month, you end up firing the employee with the worst result — crippling team morale.
But here’s the thing: employees can’t control the KPIs that you’ve created out of thin air. What they do have control over are their actions and their behaviors.
If you want to motivate your employees, you need to focus on the things that they can control. Otherwise, your employees will feel unappreciated and undervalued.
To do this, you need to expand the definition of previously misunderstood results-based punishment. This will create a healthier company culture that’ll keep your best players around.
Internal Motivators
Identity
At many workplaces today, employees feel disconnected and disengaged. They may not be given meaningful opportunities to contribute or to grow, and they often struggle with a sense of isolation from their coworkers.
But there is a powerful motivator that can help bridge this gap: the desire for a sense of membership and identity in an organization. Whether it’s through team-building activities or company-wide events, employers can foster stronger connections among employees and give them a greater sense of belonging at work.
By focusing on building up employee engagement and fostering strong relationships in your workplace, you can tap into one of the most powerful drivers of motivation and performance.
With the right strategies in place, your employees will be motivated, engaged, and more likely to stick around for the long haul. This means having a business brand that they are excited to align their personal brand with.
Purpose
At the heart of employee motivation is a desire for meaning and purpose. People want to matter, to contribute to something bigger than themselves, to make a difference in the world around them.
This is why so many people are drawn to organizations like Wikipedia — they volunteer, not making a dime because they share a common belief in the cause and value the work they do.
To truly motivate your employees, you must create and foster an environment where they can find purpose and meaning in their work. This may mean investing in initiatives that support their professional growth or giving them opportunities to contribute their unique talents and perspectives on an ongoing basis.
Many home service companies are essential services. For example, HVAC, plumbing, and electrical are all critical for a healthy and safe home. When we give essential services the reverence they deserve with our employees, we remind them of their purpose. The non-monetary reward this gives an individual is significant.
By focusing on long-term development and providing employees with meaningful opportunities to grow, you can help your team thrive both professionally and personally. In turn, they’ll be more likely to stick around — and fully invested in your organization’s success.
Adventure
Adventure stems from a sense of mastery and this mighty combo ignites the drive and passion that your employees possess.
When your team feels competent, their confidence in meeting your customers’ needs only increases, making you a top pick when it comes to selecting a solution provider.
At your company, you need to offer the kind of challenges that inspire this sense of mastery and adventure for your team. Having a career path, creating trials and tribulations, ritualizing rights of passage, and symbolism in the form of rewards, rank, badges, titles, and trophies are all ways you can put your people on a quest for mastery, purpose, and identity.
Whether it’s developing specialized skill sets or taking on complex projects, continually encouraging them to exceed customer expectations will drive success. With each success, they gain more confidence in their abilities — which fuels their competence even further.
Antimotivators
AntimotivatorsFear
If you make your employees feel like their job is in jeopardy, it might antimotivate them to work harder to prove themselves, but this type of fear-based workplace environment is the negative of motivation. It damages morale and will inevitably lead to burnout and turnover.
Encouraging failure and vulnerability with positive reinforcement has proven to be a more effective model for building both a healthy culture and a pattern for success, because only in failure can success be recognized and earned.
By doing so, your team won’t be afraid of failure or making mistakes. Instead, they’ll be motivated by the desire to create something great. After all, failure isn’t a bad thing: it’s how we learn and grow as people! So don’t let your team succumb to fear — instead, give them opportunities for success.
Shame
Weaponized shaming is intended to remove someone’s dignity. Shaming employees is always a major no-no. Not only is it cruel, but it also demotivates employees and makes them feel bad about themselves.
This will lead to resentment and eventually cause them to look for work elsewhere. Your employees want to feel worthy and like their an important asset to the team.
Make sure that you are building your employees up and not tearing them down. Instead, encourage them to do their best and praise them for a job well done.
By fostering an environment of positivity and achievement, you will create a workplace where your employees want to be and thrive.
Guilt
Guilt is a common management strategy that can have negative consequences for employee productivity and engagement.
Managers often use guilt as a way to control their employees, putting them in a cycle of overworking and self-criticism. This can cause high levels of stress and decreased productivity, resulting in increased turnover rates.
To prevent these negative effects, managers should focus on creating an environment where employees feel valued and supported. This may include providing adequate resources and opportunities for growth, recognizing individual contributions, and fostering open communication among team members.
By creating a positive work culture rooted in trust and respect, managers can help their employees thrive professionally while avoiding the damaging effects of guilt-driven management strategies.
Are there times when employees may feel fear, shame, or guilt? Possibly. Likely even.
Holding someone accountable may induce these feelings, but accountability is essential in any organization. As a leader, you don’t have to avoid holding people accountable in an effort to protect their mental health. As a leader, you do have a duty of care to ensure you don’t weaponize fear, shame, and guilt as a means of control. Unfounded control only leads to compliance, and compliance only leads to defiance.
Holding someone accountable in a kind and productive manner builds trust, respect, and even gratitude for being an epic leader. Above all else, figure out how to protect your employee’s dignity when looking to steer their actions and behaviors in a positive manner.
Sales Motivation – How Important Is It?
Sales Motivation – How Important Is It?Sales motivation is extremely important for any organization. A company’s sales team is responsible for generating revenue, so it’s critical that they’re motivated to sell.
But going deeper than that, sales motivation plays an even bigger role in overall company culture.
A motivated sales team can create a positive company environment and make every other aspect of the organization more successful.
When you put the right principles, processes, policies, procedures, people, and performance metrics in place to elevate the sales arena, you are building a happy, healthy and wealthy culture.
And a happy, healthy, wealthy culture feeds a world-class buying experience that your customers want to be a part of too.
The good news is that culture can be deliberately created and cultivated, no matter what the state or size of your business is. You’re in charge! It’s up to you as the leader or owner of the company to ensure your culture supports success.
This means that if you want a high-performing organization, you need to emphasize creating a great culture.
After all, positive company culture will lead to more engaged employees, which will lead to better customer service, higher quality products and services, and improved bottom-line results.
So How Do You Motivate Your Sellers?
Build a transformative training content schedule that guides them to mastery of their trade
One of the best ways to motivate your sellers is by providing them with regular and high-quality training and ongoing development.
This can take many different forms, from one-on-one coaching sessions with experienced sales professionals to structured classroom training programs that cover everything from the basics of selling to advanced tactics for closing deals.
Speak meaning into their life by celebrating why their role is so important
In addition to providing your team with the necessary training and resources they need to succeed, it is also important to recognize the value that they bring to your organization.
This can be done by speaking meaning into their life, celebrating why their role is so important, and reminding them of how much impact they have on both your customers and your business as a whole. Find symbols, rituals, and artifacts to bring deeper meaning to the people who help you thrive.
Remove any mental and emotional roadblocks that would have them sink into survival mode, like unpredictable compensation plans
This can include implementing clear and predictable compensation plans, providing adequate training opportunities, and offering ongoing support and resources.
By doing so, you will help your team stay energized and motivated, which will in turn positively impact your business as a whole.
Recognize them publicly for the right actions and behaviors, even the ones that didn’t land the sale
To maintain a high level of motivation and performance, it is important to praise and reward your employees for their efforts – even if those actions didn’t lead to a sale.
This sends the message that you are paying attention to their efforts and that you appreciate their contribution to the team. It also reinforces the desired behavior, so that they are more likely to repeat it in the future.
Follow these guidelines, and you’ll build a happy, healthy, wealthy company culture that is not only motivating but will also create an exceptional customer experience.
At Wizard of Sales®, we understand your home service business isn’t just meant to survive, it’s meant to thrive.
Our C.O.R.E. Playbook is a treasure map customized for helping you run your business. With our guidance, we help you explore your brand’s deepest values and beliefs, and show you how to leverage your company’s natural strengths.
It’s time to convert your greatest weaknesses into opportunities that empower your employees and elevate your company culture!
To learn more, book a demo with us today!