Imagine all your employees working towards a common goal and at 100% capacity. Think of how much more productive your team will be when they all do their individual roles properly without you breathing down their necks.

Motivation is important in keeping employees and getting them to perform above average. You do not want employees to resign just because they feel like they are in a rut or worse give very little effort seemingly just waiting for their pay checks, do you?

Motivating employees can be done in a lot of ways, some more expensive than others but all quite effective. As long as you are willing to invest time or resources you can start motivating employees.

Incentives

The most common way of motivating employees is giving them an incentive. In a simple analogy incentive motivation is:

Do X work and you will get X rewards

Rewards can be in the form of money, items, or events. A performing employee can receive a pay raise which not only keeps him or her performing well but gets others to perform as well so they can get their own pay raises. You may also give rewards such as books, electronic gadgets, even movie tickets as special rewards for doing a great job. You can also throw parties or cook offs just to show how much you appreciate what your employee has been contributing to your team.

Incentives cost some money but the amount of money you shell out to boost performance would definitely be nothing compared to the success your team can achieve when they are all motivated and giving their best performance.

Recognition

Recognition is the cheaper way to motivating employees but is just as effective as incentives. Recognition as the word implies involves recognizing and appreciating an employee's performance.

A considerable amount of time and effort is important to get recognition to work for you. You should know your employees well enough to understand how to show them that they are appreciated. Each individual has his or her own preferred means of praise so you as a motivator should be careful.

Some employees would like to be recognized in public or in front of their peers while some would prefer a private pat on the back and a few sincere words of gratitude. Knowing the very small yet significant details that are crucial to giving the proper type of recognition involves a lot of work and patience.

You would need to go around the office once a while and speak to employees to understand who they are and therefore find the most effective way of motivating them. Some employees can be motivated by something as simple as moving their shifts a few hours later or earlier, things that you would not know unless you get to know your employees beyond a superficial level. Recognition even breeds loyalty which some will argue is better than incentives.

Both incentives and recognition will work to get employees motivated. A combination of both would definitely push performance and productivity far beyond what you expect.