The Traps Of Keeping Your Team Motivated That Are Making Them Leave
Working for Google is like a kid in a sweet shop with a £100.
They have free food, free laundry services, unlimited holidays, sleeping spaces, a pole to slide on to go from one floor to another…
It’s like being paid to go to Disneyland.
Of course, they have other benefits like trainings and healthcare and so on.
They are basically doing everything they can to keep you on campus. Everything you’ll ever need is there.
But here’s the beautiful counterintuitive reality.
Recently, Fortune released their Top 100 Companies To Work For list. And Google wasn’t even on the list.
At all.
Imagine that. The Internet Giant who commands what we see is not one of the top 100 companies to work for.
Maybe because unlimited holiday is not a good enough motivation for people to stay. People only hang out for about 2 years at Google. And they are top 2 when it comes to employee retention rate.
But for us, mortals? What would be a good way to keep the team motivated?
Because at the end of the day you would like to retain your team, right?
Retaining your team is always linked to their motivations and motivation as a whole within the company.
A lot of companies out there have put team motivation into this bubble that consists of KPIs, targets, money-driven motivations, ping pong table, unlimited holiday, Lunch at work and so on.
In which case, Google maximizes the amount of work they can get out from you in any given day with the amount of “don’t leave the campus benefits”.
Now, don’t get me wrong, as a whole these motivations are fantastic. These motivations are great benefits.
But they are too generic and too broad.
The trouble with this is, they’re not individual enough.
They are a novelty and much like any other novelty, they are short-lived. And after six months unlimited holidays and a ping-pong table become the norm or worn off completely.
What are the new individual benefits that keep the team engaged? Realistically they’re never quite tapped into.
Whenever I have the opportunity to go in a company and find such solutions we break down people’s motivations into their individual formats. And we can then group these individual formats together.
And you can do this across a wider spread no matter how big or small your company is.
So even if you have 200, 300 or 3000 people in your office, you’re still going to see patterns of motivations cropping up all the time, which means you can tailor benefits to more of an individual basis.
But what does this actually mean for you as a business owner?
What it means is that the people you’re bringing on board and you’re having within your business are going to be more connected to your business, they’re going to be bringing more to the business because guess what, they’re getting more from the business so they’re going to feel more valued and feel more nourished within the business.
They’re going to want to grow the business and grow within the business.
And most importantly you’re going to leapfrog from an average 2-year retention rate to 5 years and beyond.
Because if we focus on the individual, they get that feeling of connection. They get that feeling of trust. They get that feeling of development that very, very few businesses truly offer in this unique and approachable way.
And it doesn’t cost you a lot of money or time to be able to do this. But what it gives you is considerably more sales, considerably better customer service and all these other aspects in between.
I always think when I go into a high-end watch shop, for example, they can completely get what my motivations as a customer are, and they have a passion for the product without the need of having a ping pong table at the back.
And why is that?
It’s because they are employing people with the individual motivations of the business. And when they’re training these newbies up in the business, they’re allowing them to discover what their passion for the product, for the watches are.
So when you go to a watch specialist and you speak to three people in that showroom, they’re all going to be saying slightly different things about that watch which enables them to have that personal approach with the customer and build that rapport really really quickly, which is fantastic.
In my opinion, we don’t get to see this level of rapport in places like the recruitment industry, marketing or IT.
These are just some of the industries that I worked really closely with. And during that period I was able to see this motivation side of things to come out both ways, and increase the sales, increase the marketing reach, which is, of course, the key thing when it comes to sales.
Let me give you another example.
I used to have a recruitment company. And I’m really familiar with that industry.
There’s this saying that has become the go-to standard motivation and it’s “If you don’t want to make money you’re not in the recruitment business”.
Their motivations are KPIs, targets and commissions.
But what if you can make money and still have something else as a motivator?
Making money is not always the answer to the question “Why do I so many people leave the company”.
Which in the recruitment space it’s actually a real question. Because it has the lowest retention rate. And it’s not good…
Knowing more about the individual motivations of the team is going to harness your business and grow it and take it to the level that you want to have it. And most importantly, it’s going to make the business more of a legacy.
So think about how you’re motivating your team. What could you do differently to increase the motivation?
What could you do differently to connect with the team on a very individual value based basis? And how will that help your business to grow, adapt, change and discover more about what’s going on in there?
And if you are searching for a faster way to successfully identify the individual motivations of the team and break them down into individual factors, click the link below to register for a free strategy consulting call on improving your companies retention rate.
http://www.SteveHaggerty.com/Apply
See you soon
Steven
