Increasing motivation in the workplace can have a variety of positive benefits regardless of whether you are the employer or the employee. For the employer, increasing motivation in the workplace can result in better employee retention, increased employee morale, increased productivity, and ultimately improved profits. For the employee, increasing workplace motivation can lead to faster promotions, a more fulfilling job, and better potential for advancement.
Obviously, there are a multitude of benefits to improving motivation in the workplace. In today’s modern environment, there can be many stress and barriers to feeling motivated and fulfilled in a work environment. Here are a few ways you can maximize motivation while feeling energized and present in your place of employment, regardless of which side of the relationship you are on.
Define Your Primary Purpose
The first step toward increased workplace motivation is to simply design and actionable and compelling purpose for becoming more motivated. Why do you wish to become more motivated? Do you feel that increased motivation would provide more energy for your day? Do you feel that an increase in motivation would enable you to provide a better service to your customers? This step must not be ignored.
When defining your purpose for motivation, it is important to come up with a clear purpose that has meaning. Simply saying you wish to become more motivated to earn more money is a very vague purpose and will not have the staying power to keep you going through the weeks or months ahead.
When you define a clear purpose that will both excite and motivate you, you will naturally feel stronger toward achieving your goal. It is also very important to select a primary purpose which also emotionally excites you. Selecting a purpose that will emotionally engage you is far more likely to engage your creative and logical faculties to select a plan of approach for its attainment.
Become More Present in Your Daily Activity
When you become present and fully engaged in the current moment, you will find that you have more focus and energy for the task. It is common for most to have numerous stresses, distractions, or thoughts at all times throughout the day. By allowing yourself to clear the distractions in order to focus and be present in the current moment or task you can access greater amounts of motivation.
For the same reason that it can be difficult to focus on your work when you are thinking of bills you need to pay, it can be harder to achieve needed tasks while you are engaged in other thoughts. Through learning how to better control your thoughts and become more present, you will have access to greater strength in motivation.
One simple trick you can perform is to ask yourself at multiple times throughout the day how engaged and present you are in the moment. If ever your answer is less than fully present or engaged, you can work to limit your distracting thoughts.
Have a Mission Plan for Your Day
A task list is boring and unmotivated. Too many people use task lists to record small tasks and meaningless progress throughout their day. A more effective technique is to define a clear mission plan based on your purpose.
When you apply a definite and meaningful purpose to a larger mission for the day, you will find that you more easily achieve the small tasks naturally on the path toward completing the mission plan. This technique can turn a dreary list of 20 small tasks into a much smaller grouping of daily missions which will be much more motivating to complete.
When defining your mission with a clear purpose, follow the same principles as you applied when defining your overall purpose. You will find that each mission you provide to yourself will have a clear purpose in its path toward helping you achieve your ultimate goal of increasing your motivation in the workplace.
Combining Strategies
These are a couple of the most powerful strategies and concepts you can adopt in trying to achieve increased motivation in the workplace. There are many other techniques available enjoyed by many in addition to the two listed here.
If you combine other strategies for work, life, and mental improvement with this powerful set of motivation principles, you will surge ahead of your peers who do not use these techniques.
Increasing motivation in the workplace through defining a clear purpose and having a mission plan is designed to build a powerful cornerstone from which you can learn to improve your motivation in other areas of life as well. As with all self development techniques, practice will enhance your results. Give it a try and experience an increase of motivation at work and through other areas in your life.
What Do Leaders Need to Know?
The skill of harnessing this internal motivation to make workers both productive and happy is an essential part of the leader’s role. More conventional motivators such as bonuses or disciplinary procedures may still have their place, but it is important to realize that they have their limitations. Workplaces that depend on these external motivators will tend to be less flexible, innovative and effective, and dissatisfied employees who feel trapped in the system are more likely to leave the company. People can feel less motivated under these conditions, so that offering a greater financial reward can actually reduce a worker’s internal motivation for a task they used to find interesting.
Effective leaders should instead focus on fulfilling three basic needs that can keep workers’ internal motivation strong: competence, relatedness and autonomy. People want to feel that they are competent, effectively mastering the tasks they perform, but they also need to see that their work is meaningful, understanding how it relates to the bigger picture. It is also important for people to feel autonomous, that they are choosing to complete the work rather than being forced into it. Leadership and sales management training needs to teach people how to create self-motivated workplaces, where satisfied workers can develop their skills, think for themselves and understand why their work matters.