How to motivate your team without offering a pay rise

To me, a good leader is one who does not manage, but one who inspires and motivates. If you don’t have someone to look up to or motivate you, then why bother even turning up to work? You might now be sat reading this, scratching your head thinking about how you can better motivate your team, and don’t worry – We’re about to cover it.

It’s quite easy to fall into the trap of assuming that remuneration is the biggest and/or the only motivator. And whilst money is ultimately very important to people, it isn’t the only way to motivate your staff, which is great if you don’t have the budget to offer pay raises. 

Unfortunately for so many companies, they have ‘un-engaged’ or ‘de-motivated’ staff members, and that’s a problem because this opens up a window of mistakes, lack of care and potentially resignations – Which is way more costly than that pay rise we mentioned before. So how else can you motivate your staff? 

Recognition and Appreciation

It sounds so simple, and it is when you think about it, but to an employee, it can mean a lot. For a minute, just think about what it must be like for your staff to get up every morning, go into a job they work hard in, and then to go home – all without any praise or verbal confirmation from their boss, I personally would feel terrible and over time could see myself losing interest in that job. 

So what you can do to start is to take some time either, each day or each week or each month to sit down and really understand what your employees are doing day in and day out, and then congratulate them, tell them they’re doing a great job. And I don’t mean schedule in a regular meeting with them or make it seem formal, just drop them a message, an email, or better yet tell them when you see them in the break room making a coffee – trust me, you’ll make their day.

Improve relationships between management and staff

A poor relationship between your management team and your employees can be detrimental, to say the least, so improving that can only mean good things. If you can improve that relationship either teamwide or just individually to begin, the effect you’ll create is that your staff will have much more respect for management, and thus can motivate them to work harder because they don’t feel their boss is against them.

If managers implement and practice positive and real emotional connections with staff, and in themselves become mentors as well as living up to promises and commitments you’ll find your company a nest of respect and trust which I’m sure your employees will value much more than a poor environment with a high salary. Focus on collaboration between teams and seniority levels, you’ve got to ensure that despite job titles, everyone is valued the same and is an important team player in your organisation.

Spread out work evenly

Wouldn’t you hate it if you were the only one in your team pushing above and beyond, oh and carrying your colleagues along with you? Obviously, you would, so the next important thing to take note of is to ensure that all work is spread evenly across your team, and don’t take it literally to the point where you’re giving a programmer a task your customer service agent should do, but just be fair. It’s often that an employee who is in a position of being overworked whilst their colleagues are not, won’t actually speak up as they’re concerned that they will be perceived as a complainer.

You’re going to want to protect your employees from burnout as well as ultimately leaving your organisation, so what do you do? You plan, and do it effectively, use project management tools, or a really simple tool such as Trello, you can list out all the tasks, see who’s working on what and when. Have regular but effective meetings, keep it short and sweet, and ensure your team can speak freely and highlight any issues or blockers if necessary – clear communication is always going to help you go further. Ensuring that everyone has a fair and reasonable amount of work is going to motivate them to complete their tasks, knowing that they’re an equal and important team player.

Offer a chance to learn something new

It would be so boring to do the same thing day in, day out, it’ll become mundane soon enough for anyone. And that feeling usually leads to a lack of motivation and job dissatisfaction, before you know it CV’s are being updated and interviews are occurring during lunch breaks. 

You’ll be pleased to hear that you can prevent this from happening, in the form of professional development opportunities that you can offer to be completed during the working day, everyone loves a day off from the normal workday, especially if they can learn something new without having to compromise on their personal time. There’s plenty of opportunities out there, and some could include online courses, seminars and workshops as well as conferences related to your industry.

To the employee it shows that you care about their needs as well as the companies, and let’s be honest here, it’s an absolute win-win, they learn something new, and then they can apply that new knowledge, skills and abilities into their job to help improve your organisation.

Give them the tools they need

All of your employees need a set of tools to do their job, each employee may need different tools but that shouldn’t matter, they need it. Many employees have expressed their dissatisfaction with their current job because they are simply limited by the tools they have to do their job. That might be a lack of resources, effective time management or training –  and over time that can really upset your staff to the point where they want to leave.

Now, these tools I’m on about can be a variety of things, and they could fall into the category of being specific to the job, to the employee or both. Does your programmer have an old machine that isn’t up to date and is slow? Get them the latest one. Or perhaps your customer service team constantly interrupt each other with the constant phone calls, perhaps install soft desk screens to absorb the sound. Whatever it might be, you’ll need to sit and ask your team what they feel they need to excel in their job, after all, it’s in your best interest to have them working at their optimum.

Mentorship

If you have an employee who doesn’t feel that there are any further growth opportunities in their role or even the company then it isn’t an unreasonable assumption to say they’re probably going to leave at some point, sooner rather than later I’d say. If offering a pay rise isn’t possible due to budget, or would mean you’d need to offer it to all employees in the same group, then one further option you can offer is internal mentoring. Now mentoring is great, because you can take another employee, usually from a higher position who has a lot more experience, and get them to mentor either one or many employees. This can add value where they learn new skills, or start to think differently, and can in fact help to allow them to see and envision themselves in the company further into the future, as well as professional encouragement. Furthermore, it can help increase employee satisfaction and retention.

Strengthen your culture

Your culture is pretty important if you have a great one everyone will rave about how great it is to work in your company. On the other hand, if it’s bad it can encourage your current employees to leave and potentially even deter potential future employees from considering your organisation as their next workplace. You can start to improve your culture immediately by scrapping the visual hierarchies that have such a bitter taste, you’ll find the ‘us vs. them’ argument obsolete in no time. No one wants a manager who hides away in an office, or on another floor completely, having them around will only encourage free flow conversations and ideas that could improve your company.

Consistency is also a key part in your culture, if you have your managers playing by one set of rules and guidelines whilst your regular staff follow another, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Offer everyone the same guidelines to follow, it makes it fair and will open your managers up to a lot more respect from their subordinates. You can keep some differences, obviously, such as salary, holiday entitlement – but the rest like working from home, for example, should be open to everyone.  

Added perks

Perks are a great way to help motivate employees, and they don’t always need to be financially based either. Whilst some perks won’t be exclusive to your company, offering them might just be enough to motivate your team and reduce their likelihood of leaving soon. So what can you offer as a perk? Ultimately, it’s down to you, but some potential ideas could include, working from home a few days a week, a core & flex hour scheme where employees must be in the office between certain hours but as for the rest, they can make up when they please. Some others could be working a half (or shorter) day on a Friday to give your employees that extra boost into the weekend, or simply slightly longer lunch breaks – you’ll notice none of these suggestions are groundbreaking, but they are simple and effective, try some out!

Stop micromanaging

Ahh, the silent killer in any workplace – micromanagement. If it’s never happened to you then count yourself lucky and be grateful for that, because it is quite frankly one of the worst feelings and experiences. Employees love to just crack on and get the work done, but if they have a pesky manager constantly watching over them, or overly scrutinising every piece of work they complete, then eventually they will up sticks and leave. Autonomy is great, because it can empower a person to strive for more, and isn’t that what you want as a manager? Don’t get me wrong, if a particular employee has given you a reason to keep a close eye on them, then do so, but don’t start like that, and even if they did give you a reason to do it – be careful with how much you micromanage, because your aim should be to help them get back to a place of autonomy – and let’s be honest, it takes up so much of your precious time. Just don’t do it.

Build a community 

So earlier we strengthened your culture, and now on to building a community – I know what you’re thinking… they’re the same? Well no not necessarily, and let me explain why. To build a community in your workplace is to build upon the individual connections between your employees, and whilst a culture pretty much does it from a professional perspective, you can view a community as the social aspect. There are a few things I can suggest you do, but again the best ideas are going to come from you, you know your company and your team better than anyone else. So I would propose that when a goal is achieved on a team or company level, that you get everyone together in a shared space like a break room or conference room and order in lunch, it’ll give everyone a chance to celebrate the success and build on their personal connections with one another. Something else to try is an event outside of the office where employees can bring their families, perhaps say a BBQ – and make it a tradition so everyone can look forward to it year on year. Now I’d honestly suggest for these sorts of events that you ask the team what they’d prefer, after all, it is about them.

To conclude

I hope now that you have enough to go away with to start motivating your staff with these tactics that don’t simply rely on you having to offer a pay rise. But just because there are other ways isn’t to diminish the importance of a correct and fair wage. If your staff are being paid less than they deserve, to the value of your company or to the market rate, then it would be sensible to look into offering an appropriate pay rise to anyone who deserves it. With that said and like I have said before, money isn’t the only motivator and shouldn’t be treated like it, look outside the box, be unique, it’s your company – you’re in charge and you can make it the best organisation for you and your team.