How to motivate

1. Understand motivation
There are only two types of motivation — love motivation or fear motivation. People do what they do either out of love or fear. Many go to work because they fear what will happen if they don’t. Others go because they love it, the sense of achievement they get, the opportunity to meet with friends. Your challenge is to help employees be driven by love as opposed to fear.
2. Focus on job enrichment
By making the job more enjoyable you will ensure that:
* the job is challenging commensurate with the employee’s skills and the employee with more ability will stand out and win promotion.
3. Learn to like people
From your own experiences, you know lots about motivation, so continue to:
* show genuine interest in people
* get to know them and their facilities and their interests
* listen to what they say
* recognise their contributions
* promote trusting relationship.
4. Encourage participation
Most people spend significant part of their day at work, usually in the company of others. They are often looking for additional opportunities to make maximum use of their talents and develop new ones.
Wherever possible then, try to:
* involve them in decisions with outcomes that require their commitment
* seek their views
* provide opportunities for achievement with varied, relatively short and challenging tasks or projects
* delegate tasks that help them to display particular talents
* build interdependencies among people that encourage cohesiveness.
5. Make work motivate
Work can be motivator if you:
* give employees more scope to vary the methods, sequence and pace of their work
* give them the control information needed to monitor their own performance
*encourage employee participation in planning and evaluating new techniques
*increase individual responsibility for achieving defined targets or standards.
From: Just About Everything Manager Needs to Know, by Neil Flanagan & Jarvis Finger.