5 Tips to Help Your Team Stay Motivated During Work Day

A typical workday is subject to many interruptions. These disruptions from emails, co-worker questions, texts, and social media, can make staying focused throughout the workday incredibly difficult.

This challenge is particularly true for teams. In the beginning, your team’s performance may be exemplary, but more often than not, most workers hit a plateau after a while. Reasons can range from an uninspiring work environment and ambiguous team goals. 

A lack of recognition is another key reason for demotivation in teams—recognition could include something as simple as a kind word in front of colleagues to a full-blown office lunch catering in Boston for jobs well done. The challenge then lies with getting your team back to performing its best.

In this article, we examine top tips to ensure your team stays motivated throughout the workday.

5 Tips to Keep Your Team Motivated Throughout the Day

Even though you’ve got your dream team in place, keeping them motivated is vital for productivity. Here are five ideas that you can implement to keep team members motivated.

Recognize Employees

How often do you tell the people on your team that they have done an excellent job? Do you have any formal recognition and review programs at your workplace?

Employee recognition shows your workforce that you value their contributions and closely follow their progress within the company. It creates an emotional connection between you and your team and fulfills that basic human need of wanting to belong to a group. Recognition also gives your team peace of mind and a sense that they are going in the right direction.

Failing to recognize the contribution of others is one of the biggest mistakes a team leader can make and a key contributor to team demotivation. Recognition can be anything from a thoughtfully worded email or card, free office lunch catering in Boston, or a more formalized quarterly review and “Employee of the Month” certificate.

Schedule Regular Meetings

Regular meetings are an excellent way to go over critical objectives and ensure that your team meets them.

At the start of the week, go over the tasks you wish to accomplish and communicate this to your team. Meetings can also serve as an excellent opportunity to check in on your team members and motivate them if they have an issue or are falling behind.

You could, as a bonus, hold a lunchtime meeting and order office catering in Boston. This approach will make your team members feel valued and make meetings feel like less of a chore.

Set S.M.A.R.T Goals

Creating manageable goals that your team can track can go a long way to keeping them motivated.

Outline your medium to high-level goals, and then empower each employee to take on their goals and tackle each one in a series of small tasks.

Setting manageable goals gives the team a clear picture of what they are working toward. It also removes ambiguity between distributed team members. Small goals also help the team to recognize their accomplishments as they can check off tasks daily.

Record all tasks and goals to enable your team members to know their reference points. In addition, maximize the use of collaborative tools to sync your team members, allow for adjustments, and update on progress.

Ensure that all your goals are S.M.A.R.T., meaning that any goals you give to team members should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

Failure to follow these principles means that team members will fail in their assigned goals, leading to demotivation, a loss of productivity, and further frustration. The overall result of this is that creativity suffers.

Give Autonomy

Micromanaging your employees is the fastest way to demotivate them. Humans value autonomy and feeling in control of their decisions, time, and energy.

Granting autonomy also demonstrates trust and goes a long way towards fostering loyalty and engagement in employees. It also builds self-confidence in individual team members.

In the long run, autonomy also builds self-sufficient teams, which allows you to delegate without worrying about the results.

Work Environment

One of the most important contributing factors to employee motivation is their work environment. If your work environment is comfortable and conducive to work, the likelihood of increasing your team’s productivity is incredibly high.

Ensure that your office is full of natural light and open spaces. Also, make sure your employees have a break room to relax, complete with a coffee station and refrigerated storage for convenience.

At Rootastes, we offer office lunch catering in Boston that keeps your team nourished and ready to attack the day.

Our seasonal and globally inspired menus are healthy and nutritionally balanced. Check out our services for office lunch ideas, and then contact us at hello@therootastes.com to learn more about lunch delivery and office catering.