Here’s How to Motivate and Engage Essential Employees

Positive motivation is a huge driver for essential employees in the frontline workforce. While the current climate makes it difficult to build a calm and comforting workplace, it is vital that employees work from a place of strength rather than fear or stress.Read these 5 tips to infuse motivational engagement tactics into your management style.1. Learn what motivates. First and foremost, talk to your employees to find out what is motivating to them. Managing from motivation only works when you know what types of tactics and actions will actually make a difference for your specific team members.2. Listen to ideas and feedback. Create an open forum and encourage team members to use it! Pulse surveys, like those from Butterfly, can go a long way. Regularly present frontline employees with a chance to share their mood, ideas and feedback. This shows that you care and are listening, and it motivates them to pay close attention while at work.3. Introduce positive rewards. In many workplaces, productivity is measured and rewarded by how much can get done in a day—which may no longer be a viable motivation for many. Instead, impress the value of the work your team is doing. Stress quality over quantity. Reward them with support, encouragement and understanding.4. Make changes. Remember those ideas and feedback you’ve started to gather? Use them! Make constructive changes to processes and expectations that will better serve your employees, based on what they’ve told you.5. Acknowledge initiators. When employees actively engage with feedback and ideas to improve their day-to-day, acknowledge them! Credit the changes to them and thank them for their suggestions, both one-on-one and with the full team. For more acknowledgement tactics, read our earlier post.Once you know what drives your employees to do their work proudly and with excellence, find different ways to encourage and cultivate those motivations. Butterfly was built for the frontline workforce, offering deskless teams a way to check in and share actionable feedback with ease. We want to help you engage your essential workforce so that they can work effectively and safely, today and in the future.To do that, we are offering access to our industry-leading engagement and communication tools, built especially for the frontline workforce, totally free for 90 days. Get in touch and we will set you up.