3 Smart Strategies to Boost Employee Morale and Motivation

Motivated and engaged employees are productive employees – for staff who truly love what they do, work can feel effortless and enjoyable.

But happy, effective teams don’t happen by accident. How, then, can the employer find truly motivated recruits, bring out their best and inspire them enough to keep them?

It requires a new approach to a company’s people, extending far beyond their initial recruitment.

Smart JobFit tools and big data can help identify potential leaders. Coaching and mentoring help develop latent talent. Strategic workforce planning builds a strong, dynamic work environment, bringing on future leaders.

Result? The employer makes a genuine investment in human capital which boosts productivity as well as enriching company culture.

Employee engagement is the key

Real employee engagement can radically change a company’s fortunes, as research proves.

A major survey involving 650,000 people from companies across 50 countries compared the financial fortunes of organisations with a highly engaged workforce to those with less engaged employees.

Over a one-year period, the data collected by leading global research and consulting firm Towers Watson showed striking results.

Businesses with higher levels of employee engagement experienced a 19% increase in revenue, as opposed to a 32% decrease in revenue, and a 13% rise in net income versus a decline of 3.8%.

Strong employee engagement has its roots in identifying a worker’s strengths, aptitudes and interests.

When the true potential of employees becomes clear, it’s far easier to match them up with suitable roles, build on their strengths, plot career progressions and create positive, vibrant work teams headed by top performers – the leaders of the future.

This is why the concept of ‘occupational interest’ is gathering momentum as hiring managers seek to attract and retain people who share organisational values, are strongly motivated and feel appreciated in the workplace.

Let’s look at three smart strategies designed to boost morale, enhance team development and achieve high levels of productive engagement.

1. Understand the hardwiring

Personality type and the JobFit philosophy emerged in the 1950s, when American scientist and psychology professor John Holland developed his theory that most people fit into one of six personality types – realistic (doers), investigative (thinkers), artistic (creators), social (helpers), enterprising (persuaders) and conventional (organisers).

He showed that matching a person’s basic personality with specific work environments could bring out the best in their vocational abilities, helping them to flourish and achieve their full potential.

Conversely, putting a particular personality type into an ill-matched workplace could only lead to trouble – putting a creator into an organiser’s role, or a thinker into a doer’s position.

“The choice of a vocation is an expression of personality,” Holland claimed. And his theories now form the bedrock of much institutional career planning and recruitment practices.

The important thing to remember about hardwiring – or our basic personality type – is that it’s pretty much fixed throughout our lifetime.

We can change many things about ourselves – learn to be tidier, adapt to new situations, acquire new skills and think in different ways.

When it comes to our core selves, however, this will only be tinkering around the edges. If you try and fit a round recruiting peg (new employee) into a square hole (your position), no amount of hammering will make it a good fit.

MORE: Complete the Online Job Analysis Survey

2. Identify employee interests

As well as using JobFit tools to work out personality type, you need to assess what makes your people tick – what gets them out of bed in the morning, if you like.

Once you know their strengths, weaknesses and specialist talents, you can direct their energies into the most productive business zones and tap into the areas which really fire them up and drive them to succeed.

The JobFit tool is the perfect place to start when assessing new recruits and matching them up to the most appropriate and effective roles – ‘occupational interest’ in action.

Yet JobFit criteria are just as important when reviewing the performance, scope, leadership potential and career arc of your existing employees.

JobFit is known to increase success rates when selecting future top performers by a staggering 300% – whether they are new arrivals or longer-term staff.

When accompanied by Skills Testing assessments, these behavioural analysis tools can revolutionise the way you approach recruiting and career progression by identifying real potential and turning top performers into future leaders.

While behavioural testing has been around for more than 50 years, contemporary offerings are highly customised with a comprehensive range of high performance benchmarks.

3. Get strategic with workforce planning

As well as assessing individuals, behavioural tools play a critical role in long-term workplace planning.

They can help companies solve the perennial problems of career plateau and transition, along with the employee wastage and obsolescence which occur when workers become unmotivated, disillusioned and disengaged.

Workplaces are constantly evolving, and high-performance teams don’t run themselves.

Constant assessment, analysis, smart management and strategic planning is necessary to ensure individual talents are nurtured and harnessed for the benefit of the company as a whole.

Dynamic teams are constantly changing, requiring effective managers and smart development of ideas, relationships and innovation.

How is this achieved? By truly understanding your business needs, identifying and interpreting key business challenges, and ultimately developing sustainable solutions focussed on people, product and profit.

Clever strategic planning can form the basis of a powerful action plan designed to keep individual employees on track, identify clear career progressions and ensure strong team development.

Coaching and mentoring programs ensure profitable returns on your human capital, by coaxing out the full potential of every individual in your company.

It’s the combination of an employee’s personality, cognitive function and interests which determines their real value to a company, and their ability to work as part of a productive team.

JobFit can be the solution to identifying and developing this unique suite of attributes. So why not start your journey today?