Further to our previous blogs around our mental health at Christmas plus SAD and how it affects our workforce, we wanted to give you some handy tips to ensure that you kick start 2024 on the right foot by motivating and inspiring your employees.
Glassdoor highlights that job search activity soars between December and January each year by 55% and by the 12th February activity jumps up 29% compared to a typical week, so how can you as an employer ensure that you continue to motivate, inspire and retain the talent within your organisations.
Returning to work in January after a busy and hectic December can affect how we are when we are at work, and our motivation for our job! In our SAD blog, we discussed the symptoms and signs to spot of someone experiencing SAD so we know that people can tend to loose motivation during the winter months. So, how can we inspire our employees to regain their motivation whilst at work?
Re-engage with your teams
Ensure that you re-connect and have a meaningful 1-2-1 meeting with your employees, many people start the new year off by setting personal new year’s resolutions so why not start the new year by setting and re-setting goals and objectives for your teams.
This can really help to re-gain the focus of the employees so that they know what they have to achieve and they have goals to help them succeed. Career growth is a fantastic way of motivating your teams, discuss with them opportunities for the future and what they would like to achieve in this new year. It maybe a new qualification or training course but by re-setting these goals can really help to motivate your teams.
It may also be a great opportunity for you to re-energise your workforce by sharing with them your goals and aspirations for the Organisation for 2024, what are the key accounts, objectives, financial goals that you are looking to achieve as an organisation.
If you start the year by keeping your teams appraised of your organisational objectives, they will feel motivated in supporting you to achieve them. It is important to highlight in their personal 1-2-1’s how they will personally or within their teams contribute to the Organisational successes.
Ensure that employee wellbeing is maintained
You could encourage in line with those wonderful new year’s resolutions a few activities or even a wellness week whereby you encourage the workforce to maintain a healthy start to the new year. Encourage your teams to go outside for their breaks and to gain as much natural light as possible, this will help to re-energise them during the working day, see the SAD blog for more useful ideas.
Re-focus and re-energise the working day
Whilst we are not suggesting you change the way you run your businesses, it maybe a good time to have a think about your work processes or how and when meetings take place. Do you have lots of unnecessary meetings, do you leave a meeting and think what was the point in that? If you do, the likelihood is that your employees think so too.
Build your own organisational new year’s resolutions and re-invent the way in which you hold your meetings, think about who needs to be there, drive the agendas and ensure that you leave a meeting with a purpose and a key objective to move forward with.
Think about your roles and responsibilities, your workflows – are you seeing a constant stream of attrition or sickness in certain roles in your business? Do you need to consider whether employees are in the right role for their skillset, development and the business? Ultimately, optimising an employee’s day (keeping a key eye on the organisation’s objectives) will ultimately build productivity.
Think of ways you can excite your teams to ensure that they feel motivated, inspired, engaged and valued as part of your organisation for the next year and beyond. No easy task but having the foresight to review means that you are halfway there!
