This month, businesses need to ensure that they are assessing their progress towards the promises and aims they made at the beginning of this year. Maintaining the drive and motivation it takes to push through fears of a recession is essential to go the distance.
Whether you are a freelancer overhauling your clients’ content creation strategies or a senior manager looking to communicate more collaboratively with your team members, motivation is essential. It is fuelled by things like a purposeful project, connectedness with your team, or the flexibility to be creative.
So, how can businesses achieve these main ingredients for greater motivation this year?
Work towards long-term changes
By now, any short-term changes businesses have put in place for quick wins, are beginning to crumble. Businesses should be focusing on nurturing the roots of true, structural changes, in order for the whole company to really flourish.
These roots can’t be implemented in one go, it is a slow process that comes in month-by-month reinforcement. Taking more pauses throughout the year to look back and measure our achievements can help us better steer towards the end goal. Not just with finance-based KPIs, but also with qualitative feedback from staff and clients about culture and communication.
With an uncertain economic environment, businesses should be less afraid to focus on outsized, audacious goals. Simply moving the dial by 5-10% isn’t enough. With constant industry changes, success this year requires an awareness of how to get there in the smartest way possible.
Be structured to be flexible
As most people continue to perfect their remote work strategy, it’s no wonder that sometimes the approach can tend to swing from too structured to too flexible. In order to keep up motivation throughout the business, leaders need to look at how to strike the right balance between the two.
Flexibility doesn’t mean less structure, less communication or less social time – it should mean the opposite. We just need to be more intentional about keeping our finger on the pulse of how employees are feeling and how much guidance they need.
It’s all about making the space for employees to feel their most empowered and supported in what they do, without making them feel suffocated or surveilled. Remote working has trust and communication at the centre, and so managers must make guardrails that employees feel comfortable with. According to a recent report, 27% of staff said they experienced burnout over work-related stress that has not been managed successfully, so how managers react – especially in a virtual environment – is essential to make workers work at their best.
Declutter your tech space
In physical spaces, it is harder to feel motivated and productive when you are surrounded by an overwhelming and cluttered environment. It is the same with technology in the virtual workspace. Often, cluttered and inefficient technology is what contributes to greater frustration, delays and overload when working on a project.
Once you cut down your tech stack to the ones that work best for your team, removing that old clutter makes more space for creativity and collaboration. It’s all about making space for innovation by getting rid of anything that is stopping your flow, or the speed of communication. Your tech should think as fast as you do.
Intentionally streamlining your tech stack is not just something that promotes greater motivation to be creative, but it also drives better financial decisions too. This year it’s essential that we make use of what we have in ways that drive the greatest success.
