Motivation

If you’re really lucky, what you’re passionate about in life is also what you’re really good at and, more importantly, can make a living doing it.  Unfortunately, that is not most of us.

Back in November, I wrote a blog on 6 Ways to motivate without money.    It received a great response so thought I’d provide a few more examples of ways to help engage and motivate your team without money. Let’s face it, the economy isn’t that much better.

So here’s a few ideas that have worked for me when I was pretty limited with $$$:

Guest Post By Sarah Clare, writer at Project Management Software

Volunteers are a great way to meet the needs of your organization and expand your mission without having to increase your budget. However, when you have a blended staff that includes both volunteers and paid employees.... 

Whether you call it motivation or employee engagement, everybody wants the same thing- a workforce that wants to show up and wants to give 100%.  But with incentive pools being cut and raises almost passé, what can you do?

Try one or all of these:

“If you think you can grow 5%, let’s double that and do 10%.”  That was the mantra of a former boss who embraced aggressive growth goals as a way of life.   Everyone liked working for him, so we just nodded and did the best we could. But in retrospect, we should have fought back against goals that were set in such an arbitrary manner. 

There have been a lot of articles recently about stress in the workplace. Obviously one of the biggest causes of that stress is fear. Fear that the boss’s expectations won't be met, fear of losing a job in a down economy, and sometimes just the irrational, unpredictable behavior of a coworker can make you afraid to walk in the door in the morning. The question is, does this fear actually cause an employee to do anything productive?