How to Inspire Your Employees in 20 Ways

According to the Dictionary, to inspire is to fill with an animating, quickening, or exalting influence. If you are an employer or a manager, it’s important to learn how you can inspire your people to stimulate, accelerate, and intensify your influence so that they may become more effective and efficient in performing and fulfilling their respective task to help your organization succeed. Without a doubt, your employees need an inspiration to encourage and motivate them to be more productive. Thus, here are important ways on how to inspire your employees and form an inspiring team that will bring your organization to success.

 

Make yourself an inspiration

To inspire other people, specifically your employees, you have to be the source of inspiration. You cannot inspire other people if you can’t even inspire yourself. The leaders and managers who can effectively move their followers and subordinates are those who are naturally inspirational. Some of them even don’t know that they are inspiring and they are actually becoming the inspiration of other people.

You don’t need to be a trying hard person who does hypocritical ways just to look inspiring to other people. What you should do is to try hard in developing yourself as a person to look naturally inspiring to other people. But how can you do that? The following are some ways to improve yourself and become automatically inspirational and motivational to others even without intending to be such:

1. Be honest. Make it a habit to speak the truth to your employees and to keep your promises to them. Yes, it’s difficult to be honest while others are being dishonest! But that effort in keeping your words and promises is what will actually inspire them. Be a role model of honesty so that you may inspire them to be honest too.

2. Be humble. Keeping oneself humble is as difficult as keeping honesty in oneself. But if you want to lift people up, you have to allow yourself to go down so that you can effectively lift them up. Humility is also a sign of maturity, which is rare to human beings. And if you are one extraordinary person, you can definitely inspire your followers. Remember that the sisters of pride are greed and envy, while the sisters of humility are honor and inspiration.

3. Be selfless. Selfish employers can easily become demoralizing to their employers. This is because selfishness comes with greed, pride, and envy, which are negative qualities that people don’t want to be associated with. Thus, learn the opposite, which are generosity and selflessness. Selflessness is also a spiritual virtue – a spiritual thing like inspiration. Hence, it is a great source of inspiration.

4. Be gentle. Strength is an important quality of a leader or a manager. But don’t you know that gentleness also requires strength? Yes, holding back requires great strength. Hence, learn how to control your temper and learn how to be gentle in rebuking. Also, learn how to always put that sweet smile. Smiling is simple, but it can have a great effect in inspiring people.

5. Be a man of success. No matter how kind and humble you are, if you are lazy and not working hard to be a successful person, you will hardly encourage and motivate people to do their part. Thus, be diligent and be sincere with your work and goal in achieving success. Failure is natural, but a truly successful person is one that knows how to learn and improve from his or her mistakes.

6. Be compassionate. Learn how to understand your workers, not only by understanding what’s on their mind but also what’s on their heart. Compassion is feeling what other people are feeling, whether it’s joy or pain. If you want to inspire your people, you have to show them that you know how to be attached to them mentally and emotionally. To develop compassion within yourself, you should stop being ignorant and should instead start paying time and attention in communicating with your employees to understand their concerns more.

7. Learn how to love. To love is perhaps the most difficult thing to do in this world. Only few people can really show true love to other people. But if you really want to inspire people, you have to show difference – you have to show to them that you can do even the most difficult thing in the world – love. To learn how to love your employees, you have to learn how to love yourself first. To love yourself is to improve it personally and transform it to a better person.

8. Be consistent. Be persistent in developing those good qualities, such as lovingness, patience, humility, gentleness, and compassion. This is to make them your habits. Remember that if you want to be a source of inspiration, you have to be abundant of inspiration. You should not only be inspiring in one day or one week, but you should be an inspiration continuously.

 

Make your employees inspiring

Making yourself inspiring can be achieved through personal development. But to be more effective in motivating and causing your employees to be more productive, you have to help them develop themselves. Remember that personal development is not only self-development, but it also involves developing other people. The following are ways to help your employees become inspiring and self-motivated:

9. Provide professional and personal development training. Invest training and seminars for your personnel. These training will enhance their professional skills and develop their personalities. If your employees can see and experience growth within themselves, they will have the reason to be happy and be inspired with themselves.

10. Coach them personally. Specially for small business owners and managers who handle few subordinates, having one on one coaching with the people under your management can make them feel honored and elevated, knowing that most managers and employers are hard to reach. This is also a great way to build deeper relationship with them and a great way to increase their knowledge by sharing yours.

11. Sponsor postgraduate studies. Give your employees the opportunity to grow further in their career. If they are worthy, consider sponsoring them to enroll in postgraduate courses, like master’s degree and other academic studies that will give their career a lift.

12. Give awards and recognition. Stop focusing all your attention on your employee’s faults and mistakes. But instead look at their achievements. Giving your employees the awards and recognition they deserve is giving them the opportunity to become inspiring to other people.

13. Provide competitive wages. How can they inspire their friends or even their kids and relatives if they can’t show to them that they are earning competitive salaries? Hence, avoid bargaining your employees’ compensation just to lessen your labor cost and increase your profit. Instead, try your best to give above average salaries. If it can make them more productive and can eventually increase your sales, then you don’t need to worry about losing profit.

Giving competitive wages to your employees will not only motivate them, but it can also help them solve their own financial problems, such as paying off debt and saving money for themselves. Remember that workers who are financially broke feel more ashamed than honored of themselves. Hence, don’t push them to poverty just to push yourself up to riches.

14. Give bonuses and incentives. Money does inspire people. But it’s not only the money, itself, which inspire us – it is the fact that money can be a substance or a fruit of hard work. Inspire your employees and make them inspiring to others by giving them monetary incentives for the hard work they contribute to your business. In other words, help them become fruitful so that they may be inspired with themselves and they may inspire other people.

15. Help them achieve work-life balance. People find a job to make a living and feed their family. However, even if they prosper as professionals or employees, if they will have little time to take care of their family, that will not make them inspiring people. That is why you have to help them become responsible parents to their children or responsible people to their loved ones by giving them generous time to spend with them.

A happy family is always inspiring. When your employees realize that your company is helping them build a happy family, it will surely inspire them. So aside from giving your employees monetary incentives, also consider providing them time incentives, that is, time for vacation, relaxation, and time for their family.

16. Help them become fit and healthy. Having a healthy body doesn’t only boost a person’s physical look and beauty, but it also symbolizes self-discipline. Make your employees inspiring to other people by helping them become more active and fit. There are many ways to promote health in your organization. You can consider conducting regular sports activities for your workers or giving them free membership fees in fitness clubs or gyms. Take note that this healthy objective for your workers can only be achieved if you will not overload them with too much tasks that will cause them too much stress and work-related problems.

 

Make your organization an inspiration

If we want to really inspire our employees, we have to inspire them equally and without favoritism. We should become holistic and think of the whole organization including every part of it, that is, the employees, the employer or manager, and the whole organization as one. Hence, don’t forget to make your company or organization an inspiration to everyone. Here are some ways to make it done:

17. Build teamwork inside your organization. Ensure that the people inside your organization are in unity and in harmony. If your employees feel that their team stands out from other teams in the competition or in the marketplace, then they would be honored and more inspired to be part of that team. There are many team-building activities you could initiate to strengthen teamwork among your people. These activities can be done inside and outside your premises. Also, make sure that you become a good team leader.

18. Maintain quality on your business. You customers will give testimonials and will spread word-of-mouth about your brand, products or services. If you don’t serve with quality and excellence, the consequence is that your personnel will be hearing negative testimonials from your clients or customers. This will not inspire them, but rather will demoralize them. Thus, to inspire your employees… satisfy your customers.

19. Make your company socially responsible. Make your business or organization an inspiration in your community and even to the world. If your employees know that they belong to an organization that is community-friendly and earth-friendly, then it would be just exalting and motivating for them. You may read and get tips from these 25 ways on how to make your business socially responsible.

20. Grow your business. Do not just be concerned about your growth or even your workers’ growth, but also pay attention to the development of your business as a whole. As a businessperson or an entrepreneur, you have to bring lasting profits to your business and not forsake it to come to its fate. What’s the essence of your entrepreneurship if your business is continuously incurring losses? What’s the point of being generous to your employees just to make them happy if your company will become bankrupt? Hence, give yourself and your employees the reason to be inspired and motivated by letting them see your business succeeding.

 

Conclusion

There are three fundamental ways to inspire your employees. Firstly, as an employer or manager, you have to be the source of inspiration so that you may naturally inspire and motivate your workers. Secondly, you have to help your employees become self-inspired and self-motivated by making them inspirational to others. Finally, you have to do it holistically by making your entire organization, with the help from your employees, an inspiration to everyone.