How to Keep Your Team Motivated

Many leaders have crossed the first hurdles of moving their teams remotely: ensuring colleagues have set up their tech tools, defined their processes, and permanently logged into their video conference accounts.

But this is just the first step towards creating an effective work environment for remote employees. The next critical question I must ask is: How do you motivate people who work from home?

This question is important now because, during crises such as COVID-19, people often tend to focus more on tactical work — answering the right number of emails, or following the approved project plan — rather than adapting to solve the bigger, newer problems the business may be facing.

But some teams rise above the rest in times of turmoil, regardless of the challenges. They win market share. They earn life-long customer love. They keep their productivity high or higher. In other words, they adapt. Though the academic research on remote productivity is mixed, with some saying it declines while others promise it increases, research suggests that your success will depend on how you do it.

First, it’s important to note that right now, working from home is likely to reduce motivation.

How to Measure Total Motivation

I measured the total motivation of people who worked from home versus the office, I found that working from home was less motivating. Even worse, when people had no choice in where they worked, the differences were enormous. Total motivation dropped in percentage, the equivalent of moving from one of the best to one of the most miserable cultures in their industries.

I identified three negative motivators that often lead to reduced work performance. These have likely spiked in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Emotional pressure and economic pressure are soaring as people worry about losing their jobs, paying their rent, and protecting their health. The barrage of news, questions on how to safely get groceries, and fears for relatives are deeply distressing. Inertia for work is bound to increase as people wonder if there’s a point in even trying.

I also identified three positive motivators that often lead to increased work performance. I believe these are in danger of disappearing in easy-to-miss ways during the current situation. Play, the motive that most boosts performance, could decrease if it continues to become harder for people to get things done from home. For example, people may miss the joy of problem-solving with a colleague, or the ease of making a decision when everyone is in one room. The purpose could also decline with the team’s decreasing visibility into their impact on clients or colleagues, especially if no one is there to remind them. Lastly, the potential could decline if people can’t gain access to colleagues that teach and develop them.

If business leaders don’t move to change this, shifts in people’s motivation will ultimately lead to a decline in adaptability, quality, and creativity just at the time when the post-coronavirus recovery will require productivity growth.

What Can Business Leaders Do?

It’s important for leaders to remember that work can deliver a much-needed boost to their teams, even when there’s little choice involved in their work-from-home situation.

The key is resisting the temptation to make work tactical only through strict processes, rules, and procedures. While some degree of boundaries and guidelines help people move quickly, too many create a vicious spiral of demotivation. In such cases, people tend to stop problem-solving and thinking creatively, and instead, do the bare minimum.

If you want your teams to be engaged in their work, you have to make their work engaging.

The most powerful way to do this is to give people the opportunity to experiment and solve problems that really matter. These problems won’t be the same for every team or organization. They may not even be easy to identify at first. Your employees will need your help to do this. Ask them:

Where can we deliver amazing service to our customers?

What’s broken that our team can fix?

What will drive growth even in a time of fear?

Why are these problems critical, valuable, and interesting?

Taking This Back to Your Teams

Given today’s challenges with COVID-19, there’s a simple set of recommendations I give to teams who are working remotely.

First, what you measure is the single strongest signal to your people of what you care about. If you want to show them that you care about their motivation, you can measure it using your own preferred survey tool. Then, have a discussion with them about what might be driving their motivation up or down, and what would be helpful to maximize their motivation and experimentation in the weeks to come.

You might ask questions like:

How is the current situation affecting you at the moment?

What tips do people have for how to motivate yourself and find play and purpose in the current environment?

This is your time to listen and create a safe environment in which everyone can talk.

Second, make sure your weekly routines are not focused only on the tactical work – the concrete plans you need to execute, like the email you need to answer, or boxes you need to check. Half of your week should also be focused on adaptive performance, where there is no plan to follow, but instead, experimentation and problem-solving.

Generally, I recommend a simple rhythm for remote teams.

Monday: Hold a performance meeting for the team that covers the following.

1.   What impact did we have last week and what did we learn?

2.   What commitments do we have this week? Who is on point for each?

3.   How can we help each other with this week’s commitments?

4.   What are the areas where we should experiment to improve performance this week?

5.   What experiments will we run, and who is on point for each?

Tuesday-Thursday: Have at least one individual meeting with each of your team members. To help motivate your employees, focus on helping them tackle challenges that are a slight stretch. You can also coordinate small group meetings in which employees can collaborate on the week’s experiments and tackle problems together.

Friday: Focus on reflection. Showcase and gather input on the experiments of the week. This might include presentations from project groups during which team members share metrics and insights. It’s also important to check in on each other’s motivation and progress. As the leader, set the example by asking people how they are feeling: Where did they struggle with their motivation, and where did they thrive?

Make it your mission to achieve the former and achieve greater levels of growth and productivity as a remote team than as an in-person team. This is a challenge that can keep you energized and experimenting long after this crisis is behind us.