
How to fine tune your communication activities to power up your people
What you communicate, and how you position it, can go a long way towards motivating your people – or indeed have the opposite effect. It is worth taking the time to think these matters through and carefully craft your key messages to achieve an even bigger bang for your communication buck.
What motivates your people?
What motivates you may not motivate others. Motivation is highly personal; what gets you out of bed in the morning and racing for the car-keys is unlikely to be the same thing that gets your colleagues’ motors running. The trick is to get to know your colleagues and to understand what makes them tick.
Motivational theory gives us some practical places to start. Achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility and advancement are the top five motivators according to Herzburg’s two factor model.
So, why not actively promote these elements of life at work as an integral part of your approach to communication, for example:
- Highlight the results your people have been key to delivering, directly connecting them to your business strategy, major projects and initiatives
- Acknowledge the contribution that teams and individuals have made; and thank them for their sheer hard work, dedication and the sacrifices they have made
- Showcase how your people have gone the extra mile to produce results, grasped the nettle and walked towards problems to overcome them
- Feature their thoughts on how being involved made them feel, via interviews, blogs, videos or podcasts
- Profile the opportunities for personal growth that are being created; and the people that are both seizing and benefiting from those opportunities
Motivation changes
Things that motivate people don’t remain the same over time. The ‘combination’ of motivators changes – based on all sorts of factors, economic, personal, hierarchical and so on.
True motivation has to come from within. So how can you determine what motivates a colleague? First you need create a psychologically safe space, and then you can simply ask them. That way, you can learn what engages that individual – and what doesn’t. That way you can target your communication and know where you should – and shouldn’t – be focusing your energy.
A targeted approach
When using a simple questionnaire to kick start the conversation about motivation we often find three factors coming near the top of the list of what most people say gets them motivated: a clear direction, achieving a goal and being listened to.
In our How to be a Better Communicator workshop, we can use the questionnaire output to create a matrix, with all the things that might motivate people in column one and the frequency with which they are cited as top motivators in the remaining columns. The graph that emerges gives you a pictorial representation of the motivators for that group. Patterns always emerge, which you can use to shape your approach to motivation.
Once you’ve identified the topics that matter most to them, focus your efforts on the things that you now know get people fired up with enthusiasm.
Don’t get hung up
Finally, be careful not to spend all your time dealing with the things people complain about. Assuming that their complaint is not a matter of life and death (although if it is, then deal with it!), you’d be better off focusing your energy instead on the things that actually motivate them and employee wellbeing exercises.
Find out how enhancing the motivation of your colleagues can help you successfully deliver change.