6 tips to motivate and inspire your team.
As business owners we tend to find it easy or easier to motivate and inspire ourselves, it’s our business and nobody is ever going to care for our business more than we do, right?
WRONG!
I know this goes against what a lot of people say, maybe I am delusional, but for me, a “good egg” will, POTENTIALLY, care about the success of our business as much, maybe even more than we do.
So what’s the trick?
It’s our job to find out what our employees obsess over, what gets them out of bed in the morning.
“Be more than motivated, be more than driven, become literally obsessed to the point where people think you’re f*cking nuts.” - David Goggins
Motivation is surface-level and can fluctuate up and down, that’s why some mornings, you won’t get out of bed at 5 am to go to the gym. As a business owner, what you might do is get out of bed and read your emails, why, because running a successful business is your obsession.
We believe we need to mix-up our tactics to cover us from surface-level quick wins all the way through to helping our team members achieve success in their lives.
In no particular order, here are tips and tricks we use to motivate and inspire our team:
Monthly Professional Development (PD) sessions
Every team member at Blend has a monthly PD session with their team leader. These sessions are done to help them grow their professional career.
In the very first PD with their team leader, they discuss the team members personal “Why” this is based on the book “Start with Why” from Simon Sinek and you can do an interactive live session with his team. You can find book one HERE
Together they then build-out the team members PD board (we use Monday.com to do this). Their PD board consists of the following sections:
- List of general responsibilities
- List of key responsibilities
- List of key division/process/department ownerships
- Quarterly KPIs Goals and targets for the current month
- Road to Career progression
The most important categories above are the last two points where the KPIs show them how they are currently doing and the goals and targets show them how they can get progressively better. Ultimately, the road to career progression section shows them where they need to be in order to take the next step in their career.
It’s important to note that the goals and targets will all be based on their “why” and not hidden company agendas.
External Consultants
We are huge advocates for getting in outside advice and assistance. And we work with two brilliant consultants:
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Rachel Jacobs from Ecommerce Partnerships has been the linchpin on our growth journey, she has not only helped shape our organisation but our team too.
Rach personally meets with our team to discuss how they are doing and how they are getting on at Blend.
In addition to this, Rach manages focused mastermind sessions with team members in similar positions at other agencies. This allows our team to pick the brains of other agency employees and learn about how they overcome issues and problems in their roles.
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Sarah Tomson from Real Conversations Work has helped transform our leadership team and the internal communication at Blend.
Sarah meets with the entire team once a month to run focused workshops. All the workshops we have are focused on soft skills and communication and are related back to our Insights Discovery profiles.
Additionally, Sarah has one-to-one growth sessions with our team to help them continuously improve their managerial skills.
Unicorn Train
A great find for us as a team has been a Slack plugin app called Unicorn Train. The app was developed by the former CEO and founder of Out of the Sandbox themes, Brad Millar.
The app allows our team to show appreciation to each other for doing great things. By simply typing their name, adding the unicorn emoji and giving a brief explanation of what they are thankful for in a Slack channel where we can all see and recognise the efforts of teamwork.
In addition to the instant appreciation and gratitude, there is also a winner each month that we reward with a £50 Amazon gift voucher for the team member who received the most unicorns in that month.
Weekly team game
Every Thursday we have a virtual team game, where everyone gets together to play a game.
Trivia, escape rooms, illusion shows and even custom built games that our team have built in their spare time. You name it, we’ve played it!
The team games bring out the competitive streak in our team. You get to see the type of things that make them tick and it most definitely brings some happiness and enjoyment to their day.
Quizmaster, Stephan, dressed as an Elf!
Weekly Kickstarter Meeting
The first thing we do on a Monday morning is to jump on a quick call with the entire team to have a catch up and a bit of fun to start the week. Each week a different conversation starter question is asked, like “If you could get drunk with any animal, which animal would it be and why?”
The answers to the questions are really entertaining and help us get past the usual Monday blues and into the week ahead on a lighter note.
Company Vision
Sharing our company vision has been a real successful motivator - we have an article coming out soon on the importance of sharing your company vision with your team.
Signup to our list to be informed when we push it live.
