How To Help Your Employees Be Inspired and Fall in Love With Their Jobs, Again

Love—that warm feeling you have when you’ve found someone you feel comfortable with. And wouldn’t it be great if your employees felt like this about working for you?

Now, before we alarm HR about this love thing I’m talking about, let’s be clear that this isn’t romantic love. This is about helping your employees stay inspired and connected about their work. Because at one point, we’ve probably seen quite a a few uninspired people in the office—that colleague who shows up at 8:50am instead of 8:30am. The one who takes cigarette or coffee breaks every hour. Or the one who’s always calling in sick.

Keeping employees inspired isn’t always easy, but it’s necessary if employers want their people to produce their best work and stay satisfied in their positions. Here are five ways to help your employees inspired and in love with their jobs:

1. Have an inspiring work environment

Creating a work environment that will inspire and motivate employees will definitely help them be more productive and work hard. Even with their work being demanding and stressful, if you incorporate an environment that will balance or counter that, you’ll find that their mood will positively change.

Try jumping on the open-office bandwagon to encourage collaboration in the workplace — but make sure employees still have a place to go when they need to focus.

2. Bring in the industry leaders

How would you feel when the person you look up to gives you work and life advice so inspiring that after your conversation you felt like getting your life together and establish your path to success? There’s no better way to inspire the uninspired employee than by bringing in industry leaders for speaking engagements.

Speaking lunches, for example, provide a voluntary opportunity for employees to take part in informal training. This means delivering more training to employees at minimal additional cost. Not only do programs like this help develop and inspire employees, but it deters uninspired employees from taking overly extended lunch hours. It’s a win-win.

3. Be transparent

Don’t hesitate to be honest with employees about how the company — or the individual — is doing. Show your employees how their efforts are affecting the company by letting them in with the monetary results. This is a huge motivational tool. Be open with them and disclose financial statements that show assets, capital and investments.

By doing this, you will give them a clear understanding of how their hard work contributes to the company’s overall success.

4. Show a little PDA

I’m talking about a different kind of public display of affection. I’m talking about recognizing your employees’ great work in public. Everyone loves to be recognized for their efforts. Providing praise in front of everyone in the office lets your employees know that you want others to know they did a great job, too. This can be powerful stuff in terms of driving loyalty and performance.

You need not go into great heights and give awards and incentives (although that would be awesome, too!), a simple informal praise and recognition is just as meaningful.

5. Communicate and listen

You’ve heard the saying that employees also want to be heard. But what that actually means is that employees want their leaders to more than simply hear what they’re saying — employees want managers who listen to them and sincerely try to understand what they want to say.

How do you keep employees inspired at work? Share your tips and tricks in the comment section below.

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