How to be happy

How to be happy

How to keep team (employees) motivated? my own learnings and practices

There are thousands of books available on this topic, I am not trying to write another essay on it but sharing my own thoughts/readings/experiences

1. Relationship

It doesn't come easily, it takes time and effort to build a cordial relationship with the team. My own way of doing it is to strike a balance between work relationship and personal, and it determines a quality of leadership. Relationship strengthens if the leader's commitment to the team is fair, reasonable, friendly, respectful and most importantly the gratitude towards team contributions.

2. Fairness

Fair compensation, Opportunities for growth, Knowledge sharing, Goals alignment with Organization-Employee relation, Empower an employee with responsibility, Zero gravity towards favoritism and friendship. Look at the fairness factor in all these microscopically, if your gut-feel is good, then you are doing the right things. A leader must exhibit these traits with the team, you must see the team motivation sky rocketing and the productivity is unparalleled by any measures

3. Second home

I have seen personally in many organizations where employees feel terrible even thinking of going to work, why? Is it a fault of employee? No, it is something to do with the organizational culture. Work place is like a second home to employees, it's where they spend most of their time outside their home. Look at the global corporations like Google, Microsoft and many other in the recent decades, their employee morale and motivational measures are consistently higher due to their innovative ideas in motivating their employees. I personally believe in empowering employees at the workplace with appropriate checks & balances in place.

4. Gratitude

Most of them fail to recognize gratitude, a generous recognition towards employee contribution to the growth of an organization. In recent times, most organizations are quick to layoff employees for poor organizational performance but at the same time executives rack the hefty bonuses for the good performance of an organization, lack of fairness in sharing the gratitude appropriately. Gratitude is the biggest effective motivational factor of all, unfortunately most do not share it with their teams.

One instance I wanted to point out, once former President of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam was a chief program manager for PSLV program to launch a satellite to the moon. The satellite was launched, after a short it landed in Arabian sea. Then ISRO Chairman, Dr.Vikram Sarabhai called in for a press meeting and announced that he takes the responsibility of the program failure and he would ensure that next mission would be delivered successfully. After a year, ISRO launched another satellite, this time, it was a huge success. Again for the second mission, Dr.Abdul Kalam was a cheif program manager for the successfully launched satellite program. Second time, the press meeting was announced, Dr.Vikram Sarabhai was asked Dr.Abdul Kalam to go to the press to share the success with the nation. What do you learn from this incident, a leader must show gratitude towards team contributions and share the success with the team.

more to come...

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