You can put all of the principles of marketing, accounting, and finance into place for your business. However, if you fail to motivate your employees, it’s not likely that your business will succeed.
As a manager, it’s your job to ensure that your employees are happy, that they believe in their work, and that they love being a part of your company. Anything short of that, and you risk a sub-par financial performance.
Although there are a variety of principles to keep employees motivated, the focus here will be on ensuring that your engineering staff is motivated. Here are five ways that you can keep your engineering staff engaged.
1. Give them what they want
Your engineering staff is likely made up of people who love engineering. Since that’s the case, compensate them accordingly.
Offer your engineers free training classes to enhance their skill set. Send them to conferences where they can mingle with like-minded people.
As a means of rewarding your engineers, offer them additional engineering responsibilities that enable them to build their resume and keep them doing what they already like to do.
2. Get other employees engaged
Don’t expect your engineers to be engaged if your other employees aren’t engaged. They’re not going to be motivated unless it’s part of the business culture.
Instead, learn principles of employee motivation (some of the principles listed here will work for other employees as well) and put those into practice. Expect your employees to be engaged, and they will likely view diligence as a common practice at your company.
3. As much as possible, resist change
Pick a set of rules and procedures that are requirements for your business and stick with them. Avoid creating new rules all the time. Also, avoid the temptation to not enforce the old rules to the point where people ignore them.
Foster a business atmosphere of consistency. Your employees should know what’s expected of them when they walk in the door every morning. They shouldn’t wonder which policies will be changing or if any new ones will be added.
It is much easier to keep employees engaged with nearly immutable policies in place that are meant to reinforce the business mission.
4. Publicly reward go-getters
What motivates people? Seeing that there are rewards given to people who go the extra mile.
When someone on your team does an outstanding job, make sure that the person is recognized publicly. Beyond that, the person should receive some type of tangible reward as well (such as a gift certificate to a nice restaurant).
5. Be fair
Engineers work every day in black-and-white hard facts and figures. That will impact how they view the world.
As a result, they’ll want to see their managers applying the same principles to everyone, equally. If they see that you’re playing favorites or glossing over the failures of one person while strictly reprimanding another for those same failures, then you’re likely to demoralize your engineering staff.
Here at Selectek, we know more than anyone else about how to fill those in-demand engineering positions. We have a proven track record in matching skilled candidates to exact-fit opportunities. That’s been the basis of our success, and why we’ve become the staffing solution of choice for many hiring managers looking to fill engineering positions.
