Simple and effective strategies to motivate your employees
Taylor Humphrey
·April 25, 2024
Hiring can be exhausting – so when you find great team members, it’s important to do everything you can to keep them happy.
Depending on the industry, anywhere from 12% to 60% of employees voluntarily leave a workplace each year— and that comes at a high cost to employers.
When an employee leaves, you’ll need to advertise for the position, then spend time interviewing applicants and onboarding the eventual candidate—all whilst losing productivity during the time the role is open. In fact, when an employee leaves, it can cost anywhere from 50% to 200% of the team member’s salary to replace them because of all the extra work incurred in recruiting a replacement.
That makes it crucial to come up with strategies that will help you motivate employees and boost your staff retention rate.
Here are some ideas for building a positive workplace culture that will keep your team energised:
Compensate fairly
First off, employees won’t stick around long if they don’t think they’re being compensated fairly.
All employees—including day labourers in your warehouse—should be paid, at minimum, the real living wage, which is currently calculated as £12 per hour in the United Kingdom at large, and £13.15 in London.
Although the national minimum wage is only £8.60 across the UK, the Real Living Wage campaign annually assesses the cost of living to determine the hourly rate an employee must make to be able to cover basic life expenses. By ensuring that even your lowest paid employees are earning a living wage, you can empower them financially so that they can put their focus onto work, rather than stress about making ends meet.
When it comes to compensating employees farther up the ladder, use a tool like PayLab to research average salaries for the roles that you’re hiring, and make sure you’re over that baseline to ensure that they’re not likely to jump to a competitor for better wages.
Build a collaborative culture
As an ecommerce merchant, you may be working with several different categories of employees. You’ll likely have an operations team to support you with your sales, marketing, IT support, and customer service. Depending on what you’re selling, you may supervise a team that manufactures your products. And if you don’t outsource your inventory management to a 3PL, you’ll have a team involved in warehouse operations and logistics, focused on moving your inventory through the supply chain.
Your manufacturing, operations, and warehouse teams may work in silos, with minimal visibility into each division, or even between departments or teams. Encourage collaboration between divisions, by, for instance, inviting your corporate staff to spend a day in the warehouse, or inviting the warehouse team to see how your products are made.
For teams that need to interact regularly, it’s important to adopt communications technology that will help them collaborate easily, including messaging platforms like Slack or Teams and project management tools like Asana or Basecamp. Setting up clear priorities, and making it easy for employees to ask one another for support, will ensure that they stay focused on their goals without getting overwhelmed, reducing burnout rates.
Incentivise your employees
Recognize your employees when they go above and beyond, and empower your team to give public kudos to their peers as well. When employees feel like their work is appreciated, they’re 2.7 times more likely to be highly engaged with their workplace, and businesses that prioritise employee appreciation say that their employees are 56% less likely to start job-hunting.
While bonuses, promotions, and salary increases are powerful forms of recognition for a job well done, there are plenty of smaller forms of incentives that can help you spotlight your star employees. Incentive programmes, such as recognition cards, awards ceremonies, and personalised certification programmes tied to clear goals are all great ways to honour your employees’ accomplishments and show them how much you value them.
Offer flexibility and autonomy
Employees want to be trusted – so when you can let them perform their jobs without micro-managing them, they’ll be more likely to stick around.
Once employees have completed their onboarding and training period, focus on setting longer-term goals for their performance, rather than monitoring their work from hour to hour. When possible, give them scheduling flexibility to enable them to meet outside commitments while still prioritising their team’s business goals.
For jobs that can be conducted remotely, you might consider offering a hybrid or fully remote work environment to improve your employees’ work-life balance: Companies with fully on-site roles see twice the turnover of companies with remote hybrid roles.
By setting clear goals and making employees accountable for meeting them, you can focus less on what they’re doing day to day, and more on what they’re accomplishing over time.
Provide professional development opportunities
Employees don’t want to feel like they’re working in a dead-end job – so it’s important that you’re able to offer every employee at your business the chance to improve their skills and move into new levels of responsibility at the company over time.
When you hire your employees, even at the lowest level, you should help them understand what a career growth plan could look like for them, whether that means moving from a warehouse order picker to a zone supervisor, or getting a promotion from a customer service representative to a customer service manager.
Make sure that their managers meet with them regularly to evaluate performance, and provide them with positive feedback to help them grow professionally. You can also offer upskilling opportunities within the workplace, such as budgeting in time for your ecommerce manager to complete certificate programs on the job that will help them master SEO and other important digital marketing skills.
Use technology to streamline manual labor
Employees will quickly become disengaged if they feel like they’re doing the same thing over and over. By automating the menial drudge work in your business with technology, you can free up your employees’ time to focus on upskilling and taking part in strategic initiatives.
For instance, you can introduce chatbot technology to help your customers find the answers to common questions, while reserving your customer support agents’ time for more complicated queries that the bots can’t handle. Or, rather than relying on your support agents to manually initiate every customer return request, you can use a returns management solution like Loop, where customers can easily jumpstart the returns process with no need for support.
By adopting best-in-class technology to support your operations, you’ll be able to boost employee productivity while letting them focus on the type of high-priority work that will help you scale your business.
Want to see how returns management automation can contribute to workplace productivity?
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