Do you know that the best ways to motivate employees are hidden in your internal tools at hand? Continue reading to find out how to create an ultimately more efficient, energized workplace in 5 steps.
It isn’t always easy to know whether your employees and coworkers feel highly motivated at work or not. They may seem happy and excited to come to work, but in reality, there may be some hindrances that aren’t allowing them to reach their full potential. What we do know is that employee motivation matters – Highly engaged businesses see a 20% increase in sales and a 10% increase in customer ratings compared to businesses with low engagement levels (officevibe). With tools like an organizational intranet, there are multiple ways to motivate employees and show that leadership cares about their development and happiness.
5 easy ways to motivate employees through your intranet
1. Encourage Professional Development
Your intranet is a fantastic tool to, directly and indirectly, point employees in the right direction for learning and growth. You can set up an online training calendar to house your classes available for signup, learning materials like videos and documents, and create tests with question banks. You may also want to convey employee development offerings such as external courses or diplomas that you subsidize or use your calendar to highlight upcoming development conferences. Finally, make your training site fun and inviting (maybe offer rewards for top scores) so that employees actively want to engage in training during their own time or any downtime.
2. Individual Recognition and Praise
Do you remember how you felt the last time when your boss publicly praised you at work? It hopefully comes as no surprise that employees highly link recognition with motivation. You can use some immediate recognition around birthdays or work anniversaries that will pull directly from the employee’s info in your directory. You can also post specific achievements like promotions, project completions, or personal life achievements through your news app and promote that on your main site. People will be thrilled and energized to see their name proudly displayed on their company intranet!
3. Highlight Team Achievements
Showing an entire team’s work and development is also one of the easiest ways to motivate employees. It allows you to take advantage of the above but with multiple people at once. Again, you can use news and announcements to promote projects and milestones directly on your intranet. However, you can also set up team sites for all your departments and congratulate teams directly. For example, you may want to set up a sales team site and show some big wins on it to boost team morale (you can even directly display reports from your CRM on your intranet via custom code or iFrame embed).
4. Direct Career Opportunities
There’s nothing more de-motivating than a missed opportunity. If I’ve been waiting for a chance to move into a new role and then suddenly find out this role was not only created earlier but already filled, I’ll likely not be overly impressed with the level of advancement communication at work. Make sure to keep people informed using your job openings tool to display internal job postings. Create the job, add a description, salary, and a start/close time, and you can even promote these openings or subscribe to people and groups to get notified of new postings.
5. Increase Job Clarity
This final point may be lesser-known and intuitive, but motivation can even be reduced if employees don’t know what they are doing at work! Unclear roles and responsibilities can be stressful because your team members don’t understand how they fit into the team, resulting in difficulty finding that ‘task significance’ – the degree to which people feel motivated by being able to see the difference that their job makes (Thoughtful Leader). This is another excellent use-case for your team sites: add resources, job tools, tasks, assignments, projects, and anything else that helps define that team or department’s role within the organization.
Are there other ways to motivate employees using your internal communications? Feel free to leave them in the comments below!
To motivate your employees even more with internal communications tools, book yourself a FREE DEMO call with us today. But before that, do not forget to take our complimentary internal communications assessment to see how your current intranet efforts are doing so far!
