How Do You Keep Your Employees Motivated?

Well motivated employees lead to high business productivity, minimal staff turnover and greater profitability for your business. However, how do you keep your employees motivated?

Motivating your employees is not just about paying a competitive salary or offering perks and bonuses. To ensure your employees are well motivated you need to consider all aspects of your business.

Here are some hints and tips to help you:

1. Make your employees feel valued. Thank them, give them praise, recognise them for their contribution to the business, encourage them to feel that their work makes a difference to the business and give feedback constructively.
2. Communicate with your employees in an open and honest way, including regular staff meetings in groups and on a one-to-one basis and staff updates on how the business is performing and management decisions that have been made.
3. Review performance on a regular basis through staff appraisals and individual update meetings, ensuring individual objectives are realistic and align with the overall business objectives. Ensure your approach is consistent and fair between employees.
4. Consult with your employees before making decisions that will affect them and encourage your employees to make suggestions for improvements in the business. Ensure you listen to your employees and acknowledge their opinions.
5. Develop trust and teamwork among your employees and encourage them to ask for help when problems arise.
6. Give your employees a reasonable amount of autonomy and control and try and ensure each employee has a variety of interesting and satisfying work.
7. Support your employees through times of change in the business, in achieving work/life balance and managing stress.
8. Provide employees with development and career opportunities, through training, work placements and encouragement.
9. Create an atmosphere where employees enjoy working alongside their colleagues, where there is time for humour and fun and take the time to be interested in their life outside work. Provide a good working environment, together with the right training and equipment to do the job.
10. Pay your employees a competitive salary and appropriate bonuses and perks.

If you would like further information or to use any of our services please refer to the Makin It Happen - Coaching, Mentoring & Stress Management website at http://www.makinithappen.co.uk or contact Liz Makin at Liz@makinithappen.co.uk.

Monday Motivation: Bounce back from a set back

Monday Motivation: Bounce back from a set back

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Becoming a Proactive Leader

Becoming a Proactive Leader

by

Denis Waitley

The knowledge era’s new leaders, many of whom are immigrants and women, are managing change by conceiving innovative organizations and novel ways to attract and motivate employees. They are learning to be proactive instead of reactive, and to appreciate the full importance of relationships and alliances. They also have a healthy aptitude for risk and perseverance, and know how to gain strength from setbacks and failure.

Life’s Batting Average

Baseball’s greatest hitter grew up near my neighborhood in San Diego. When Ted Williams slugged for the Boston Red Sox, my father and I kept a record of his daily batting average. And when I played Little League ball, my dad told me not to worry about striking out. In Williams’s finest year, dad reminded me, the champion failed at the plate about 60 percent of the time.

Football’s greatest quarterbacks complete only six out of ten passes. The best basketball players make only half their shots. Even with satellite mapping and expert geologists, leading oil companies make strikes in only one out of ten wells. Actors and actresses auditioning for roles are turned down twenty-nine in thirty times. And stock market winners make money on only two out of five of their investments.

Since failure is a given in life, success takes more than leadership beliefs and solid behavioral patterns. It also takes an appropriate response to the inevitable, including an effective combination of risk-taking and perseverance. I meet many individuals who are seeking security at all costs, and avoiding risk whenever and wherever possible. Knowing that certain changes would make success much more likely for them, they nevertheless take the path of least resistance: no change. For the temporary, often illusory comfort of staying as they are, they pay the terrible price of a life not truly lived.

Parable of the Cautious Man

There was a very cautious man,

who never laughed or cried.

He never risked, he never lost,

he never won nor tried.

And when he one day passed away,

his insurance was denied,

For since he never really lived,

they claimed he never died.

In other words, missed opportunities are the curse of potential. Just after the Great Depression, Americans, perhaps understandably at the time, took many steps intended to minimize risk. The government guaranteed much of our savings. Citizens bought billions of dollars worth of insurance. We sought lifetime employment and our unions fought for guaranteed annual cost-of-living increases to protect us from inflation. This security-blanket mentality has continued in recent decades as executives awarded themselves giant golden parachutes in case a merger or takeover took their plum jobs.

These measures had many benefits, but the drawbacks have also been heavy, even if less obvious. In our eagerness to avoid risk, we forgot its positive aspects. Many of us continue to overlook the fact that progress comes only when chances are taken. And the security we sought and continue to seek often produces boredom, mediocrity, apathy and reduced opportunity.

We still hear much about security, especially from federal and state politicians. But total security is a myth except, perhaps, for those six feet underground in the cemetery. We may indeed ask our government for guaranteed benefits. But we must be aware that when a structure starts with a floor, walls and ceilings will follow. And herein lies a paradoxical proverb:

You must risk in order to gain security, but you must never seek security.

When security becomes a major goal in life – when fulfillment and joy are reduced to merely holding on, sustaining the status quo – the risk remains heavy. It is then a risk of losing the prospects of real advancement, of not being able to ride the wave of change today and tomorrow. Had the founders of Yahoo, Amazon.com and America Online been concerned with immediate profits and return on investment, we would not be enjoying those Internet services today, each of which has a greater market capitalization than IBM or General Motors.

Procrastination Doesn’t Make Perfect

Perfectionists are often great procrastinators. Having stalled until the last minutes, they tear into a project with dust flying and complaints about insufficient time. Perfectionist-procrastinators are masters of the excuse that short notice kept them from doing the quality job they could have done.

But that’s hardly the only variety of procrastination – which is one of my own favorite hiding places when I try to blame external conditions instead of myself for some difficulty. Mine comes with a gnawing feeling of being fatigued, always behind. I try to tell myself that I’m taking it easy and gathering my energies for a big new push, but procrastination differs markedly from genuine relaxation – which is truly needed. And it saves me no time or energy. On the contrary, it drains both, leaving me with self-doubt on top of self-delusion.

We’re all very busy. Every day we seem to have a giant to-do list of people to see, projects to complete, e-mails to read, e-mails to write. We have calls to answer and calls to make, then more calls to people with whom we keep playing voice-mail tag.

Henri Nouwen’s classic book Making All Things New likens our lives to "overstuffed suitcases that are bursting at the seams."

Feeling there is forever far too much to do, we say we’re really under the gun this week. But working hard or even heroically to solve a problem is little to our credit if we created the problem in the first place. When most people refer to themselves as being under the gun, they want to believe, or do believe, that the pressures and problems are not of their own making. In most cases, however, the gun appeared after failure to attend to business in good time. Instead of being proactive early, they procrastinated until the due date became a crisis deadline.

By the Inch Life’s a Cinch, by the Yard it’s Hard

One of the best escapes from the prison of procrastination is to take even the smallest steps toward your goals. People usually procrastinate because of fear and lack of self-confidence – and, ironically, become even more afraid when under the gun. There are many ways to experiment and test new ground without risking the whole ball game on one play.

 

Experience has shown that when people go after one big goal at once, they invariably fail. If you had to swallow a twelve-ounce steak all at once, you’d choke. You have to cut the steak into small pieces, eating one bite at a time. So it is with prioritizing. Proactive goal achievement means taking every project and cutting it up into bite-sized pieces. Each small task or requirement on the way to the ultimate goal becomes a mini-goal in itself. Using this method, the goal becomes manageable. When mini-mistakes are made, they are easy to correct. And with the achievement of each mini-goal, you receive reinforcement and motivation in the form of positive feedback. As basic as this sounds, much frustration and failure is caused when people try to "bite off more than they can chew" by taking on assignments with limited resources and impossible timeline expectations.

Two major fears that sire procrastination are fear of the unknown and fear of rejection or looking foolish. A third fear – of success – is often overlooked. Many people, even many executives, fear success because it carries added responsibility that can seem too heavy to bear, such as setting an example of excellence that calls for additional effort and willingness to take risks. Success, without adequate self-esteem or the belief that it is deserved, also can create feelings of guilt and the result is only temporary or fleeting high achievement. Playing it safe can seem more tempting than a need to step forward with determination to do it now and do it right.

Moving from Procrastination to Proactivation:

Here are some ideas to help make you a victor over change rather than a victim of change:

1.    Set your wake-up time a half hour earlier tomorrow and keep the clock at that setting. Use the extra time to think about the best way to spend your day.

2.    Memorize and repeat this motto: "Action TNT: Today, not Tomorrow." Handle each piece of incoming mail only once. Answer your e-mail either early in the morning or after working hours. Block out specific times to initiate phone calls, personally take incoming calls, and to meet people in person.

3.    When people tell you their problems, give solution-oriented feedback. Rather than taking on the problem as your own assignment, first, ask what’s the next step they plan to take, or what they would like to see happen.

4.    Finish what you start. Concentrate all your energy and intensity without distraction on successfully completing your current major project.

5.    Be constructively helpful instead of unhelpfully critical. Single out someone or something to praise instead of participating in group griping, grudge collecting or pity parties.

6.    Limit your television viewing or Internet surfing to mostly educational or otherwise enlightening programs. Watch no more than one hour of television per day or night, unless there is a special program you have been anticipating. The Internet has also become a great procrastinator’s hideout for tension-relieving instead of goal-achieving activities.

7.    Make a list of five necessary but unpleasant projects you’ve been putting off, with a completion date for each project. Immediate action on unpleasant projects reduces stress and tension. It is very difficult to be active and depressed at the same time.

8.    Seek out and converse with a successful role model and mentor. Learning from others’ successes and setbacks will inevitably improve production of any kind. Truly listen; really find out how your role models do it right.

9.    Understand that fear, as an acronym, is False Evidence Appearing Real, and that luck could mean Laboring Under Correct Knowledge. The more information you have on any subject – especially case histories – the less likely you’ll be to put off your decisions.

10.             Accept problems as inevitable offshoots of change and progress. With the ever more rapid pace of change in society and business, you’ll be overwhelmed unless you view change as normal and learn to look for its positive aspects – such as new opportunities and improvements – rather than bemoan the negative.

There is actually no such thing as a "future" decision; there are only present decisions that will affect the future. Procrastinators wait for just the right moment to decide.

If you wait for the prefect moment, you become a security-seeker who is running in place, unwittingly digging yourself deeper into your rut. If you wait for every objection to be overcome, you’ll attempt nothing. Get out of your comfort zone and go from procrastinating to “proactivating.” Make your personal motto: "Stop stewing and start doing!"                   

 

Denis Waitley is one of America's most respected authors, keynote lecturers

and productivity consultants on high performance human achievement. He has inspired, informed, challenged and entertained audiences for over 25 years from the board rooms of multi-national corporations to the control rooms of NASA's space program; from the locker rooms of world-class athletes to the meeting rooms of thousands of conventioneers throughout the world. He was voted business speaker of the year by the Sales and Marketing Executives' Association and by Toastmasters' International and inducted into the International Speakers' Hall of Fame. CopyrightC Denis Waitley. All rights reserved. For information about his Keynote presentations, contact the FrogPond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email susie@FrogPond.com;

http://www.FrogPond.com

Do You Have Stinkin' Thinkin?

One of the biggest ahaaa moments for me during my journey of personal development has been learning about the power of the words that we use.

We experience life in abundance whether that abundance be positive or negative. When I look out in nature I see so much abundance everywhere. So where did the poverty mindset that so many people have today come from? I believe one of the reasons so many people think so negatively is because of the words they use and the words they hear.

Words will determine what you think. Do you have order in your mind? I know my own mind has had a lot of chaos over the years. I was a pretty negative thinker, I had a lot of "Stinkin' Thinkin'" happening in my life. What made me realize that I could control my thinking happened because of a headache.

One day a friend told me to quit saying "I have a headache". I looked at her like she was crazy, why would I not say it when it was the truth, I did have a headache. Now for me that was a very bad thing because I have suffered from migraine headaches since I was six years old. She kept telling me to just say "I am healthy" regardless of how I felt.

At that point I tried to make sense of what she was saying and honestly I just didn't get it. However, she was a very good friend and I trusted her so, whenever I started to get a headache, I would repeat to myself "I am healthy". Sometimes it would work and the headache would start, but not develop into a full blown migraine. That was huge for me and made me stop and think about the words that I was using, and the words I was hearing from others.

We cannot always control our thoughts, but we can control our words, and repetition impresses the subconscious, and we are then master of the situation." Jane Fonda

We frame our thinking by the words we hear. What we listen to on a regular basis impacts us more than we realize. What we allow to enter our brains over and over again gets imbedded into our thought patterns and eventually becomes habit. Some of our ways of thinking are good for us, others are not.

We have to choose daily to make quality word decisions or continue with stinking thinking. Ask yourself what am I surrounding myself with every day? What is repeating over and over and over and over? Is it positive or negative? Is it empowering on disempowering? It is not only the words we speak but the words of others, the words of the media through t.v. and radio, even through music.
The habits we have are a result of our thinking. Sometimes we are negative without even realizing it. Do we say "remember to pick up dog food" or do we say "don't forget to pick up dog food" . Our brains don't recognize the negative and they hear "forget to pick up dog food". Hmm, we are programming our minds to do the exact opposite of what we want.

Making those quality decisions and choosing to say the positive words of the behavior we want rather than what we don't want can change our entire life. When our words line up with the desires we have for our life we begin to speak our future into existence.

How we think each day can be set up by the words we hear and use when we first get up in the morning. What are you hearing? Are you turning on the negative news to start your day? You may want to re-think that habit and start your day on a more positive note. One of the ways you can change your words is through the use of affirmations. I start my day, every day, with positive affirmations. It would be my pleasure to share my list of affirmations with you. Simply send me an email to Carla@RetireWithCarla.com, put affirmations in the subject line and I will forward to you the list I say each morning.

Your life is what your thoughts make it." - Marcus Aurelius

The good thing is that we all know we can change our habits. We don't always choose to do so but we still know that we can. Words are a habit, and it is just a process to change them.
Delete the habit of negative words. Stay focused the daily habit of powerful and positive words. Remember these are habits therefore in most cases some internal digging is necessary to find out just what you are saying that is not in your own best interest.

My suggestion is to get a recorder, record yourself and then play it back. You may be very surprised at what you hear. You may even have a computer that has a recorder built into it. It is important to relax and get the "real you" on the recorder. Therefore I suggest that either the beginning or end of your day, sit down with the recorder and tell the story of your day. Once you get into your story it will be much easier to speak naturally and chose the words you would normally say. Plus once you have recorded yourself a few times it will also become more natural and you will hear that "real you".

Let me know, via email, what kind of words you have been thinking and saying and which words you have changed. I would love to hear your success stories. Changing the habit of my words has had a powerful impact on my life. It has even given me the courage to write this article and share what I have learnt with you! I hope that you will be able to impact your life in a powerful way also. http://www.RetireWithCarla.com Carla@RetireWithCarla.com http://retirewithcarla.podomatic.com/ Carla *The Champion* McNeil

 

Do you know Randy Snow?

I just listened to Randy Snow on a teleconference
last night. Did you have a chance to dial in?

 

He was interviewed on the *Motivational Mill.ionaire
Webinar*

 

Monday September 8th...

 

*Special LIVE Guest...

 

Randy Snow...

 

So Who is Randy Snow>>>

 

Randy Snow has proven that in order to
succeed today, you must have a 100%
able-bodied mind!

 

Following his injury, Randy experienced a traumatic,
but ultimately successful, personal transition. Still
paralyzed from the waist down, Randy now refers
to his injury as...

 

The best and the worst thing that
has ever happened to me....

 

As an athlete, Randy was inducted into the
United States Olympic Hall of Fame in 2004.
Randy's athletic achievements include...

 

- Representing the United States in
three summer Paralympic Games;
 
- Competing in three different Paralympic
sports (racing, basketball and tennis)

 

-Winning medals in each of these three
Paralympic sports

http://www.RandySnow.com

 

One of Randy's quotes was "there is nothing
wrong with a silver medal life, if behind it
you have gold medal effort."

 

Inspire your employees, you can listen to the entire call if you are a member of the Lifestyle Freedom Club.

 

Go Here Now: http://tinyurl.com/5cyujb

 

 

Are You Insane?

Can you believe someone just said that to me?

Yes - they said, Lisa, ARE YOU INSANE for

working so hard to assist others to life a lifestyle that

they long for?

The answer I came back with was "ABSOLUTELY, I have a right

to bless others and mentor them to a better way of life".

I've learned myself from one of the best coaches, John Di Lemme

of www.ChampionsAreBornLosersAreMade.com.

I can personally introduce you to him through the

Lifestyle Freedom Club. Go here now...http://tinyurl.com/5cyujb

Treat yourself to a better life. Join me.

Lisa Saline

Again...take action today http://tinyurl.com/5cyujb

Your Success is My Passion.

Quote Today

"Character consists of what you do on the third

and fourth tries." -- James Michener

 

Are You a Member of the #1 Success & Motivation Club?

Check it out http://lifestylefreedomclub.com/member/?page=DreamAndProsper