A common complaint in Ghana is that it is difficult to find talented, dedicated, and hard-working employees. But, as an entrepreneur, you are ultimately responsible for the success of your employees. In this blog, we’ll explore ways to motivate your employees.
Manage Your Expectations
Expectations shape behavior. If you expect your employees to be lazy, you will treat them one way. Your employees may then expect that you will always be angry with them. You will not give your employees more responsibility and when they have a problem, they will try to hide it from you. Change your expectations and people can rise to the occasion.
Find Out What Your Employees Value
While expectations change, values are held dear. Successful managers discover what their employees value and use it to get the best work. For example, if your shopkeeper values creativity, you can ask them to manage your store’s Instagram. You’ll quickly see that this changes their sense of pride in their work.
Get to Know Your Employees
How can you understand your employees’ values? The answer is simple, get to know them as people first, and employees second. Invite them to a meal at your home, ask about their children, go out for a drink (tea counts!) just to ask them about their goals. Respect is reciprocal.
Motivation Formula
What if I told you there was a simple formula for motivation? Would you apply it? Motivation = the expectation that your work leads to performance x the expectation that performance leads to a reward x the value of the reward. If any of those three factors drop to 0, Motivation = 0.
Imagine you were a server at a restaurant that served bad food. No matter how good your service was, customers would never be satisfied. Would you hustle at work? Imagine if you were a sales person and your pay was the same if you made 1 sale or 100 sales. Would you stay late? Effort must lead to performance which must lead to a worthwhile reward.
Get Mission Buy-in
Did you know that one of the reasons OZÉ was founded is to help solve the problem of youth unemployment in Ghana? Our goal is to help you grow so that you can earn money and also create jobs. Even if you are not there yet, we hope that one day all OZÉ users will be big enough to need employee motivation tips.
OZÉ is a mobile platform that helps small business owners in Africa (starting in Ghana) to make data-driven decisions to improve their performance, tap into networks, and access capital. Entrepreneurs can track their sales and expenses, who owes them money and who they owe money to, see their profits on a dashboard, send receipts and invoices, and even access a business coach. Interested? Click here to try it today!