As the New Year approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to keep the team motivated. We’ve come so far so quickly, there are bound to be some instances where things start to normalize and perhaps even get a bit stale.

So here are some things the management will be making a focus in 2015 to keep engagement high:

1. Say Thank You – A timely, specific and public thank you often generates a sense of engagement even greater then a small monetary reward. Simply put, we can strive to do a lot more thank yous in the coming year.

2. Looking Ahead – Ambition and career progression are two of the key staff motivators, no matter what level an employee is working at. In 2014, we promoted over dozen team members from entry level to leadership positions. We will constantly look to optimize skills and interest as we continue to grow.

3. Showing Up Matters – We have been talking about an attendance based incentive, perhaps something along the lines of offering employees who have 100 percent attendance with some kind of recognition gift? This is one I think can really let the team know it matters a lot to the business when they are present and on-time.

4. Follow The Leader – A sense of competition can be a great way to motivate and pitching teams against each other in terms of productivity or quality often has many positive side effects. We’ve had some success with this in 2014, but I think with some fine tuning and polish, we can make it a staple of 2015.

5. Share The Love – Sharing pictures of the team on social media is one way to show your team how much they truly are valued. It’s more then just work. It’s a family.

These ideas are just the tip of the ice berg. When we have the next leadership meeting in January, we will figure out how better to empower, engage and motivate the team for the coming year.

http://blog.sfgate.com/storystudio/sponsoredarticles/adv/?prx_t=x6ABAAfoBApB8LA

This article is full of interesting viewpoints and could easily lead to a half dozen blog posts.

However, right now I am really thinking about employee engagement.

Engagement is a tricky emotion. When someone is truly engaged in their work its special. Most of the time most of us are mostly engaged, but not really feeling it all the time. And sometimes our engagement is on a mostly negative level.

So how does a company keep the majority (if not all) of its employees engaged most of (if not all of) the time? Well, based on my own experience, nothing makes me feel more engaged then more work than I can handle, but not so much that it’s impossible. The sense of always having something to do, coupled with a consistent sense of accomplishment is what drives me towards engagement.

During my 15 years with Wells Fargo, I had some years where I was fully engaged and a few where I was not.
By far, my most accomplished years where there ones where I felt vital to the success of the business. So how to replicate that with everyone around me today?

I’ve got a team of over 60 people, most working independently from home. Only a handful have been with me for just over a year, the rest all less than a year. Our jobs are very much an ebb and flow kind of work, where we seem to have periods of too much and periods of not enough work to do to keep everyone engaged. So that’s what I think about a lot.

Starting in January, we are going to kick off a few new side projects to give team members more opportunities to feel productive during the slow times and we are going to institute a more structured incentive plan to reward hard work in the fast times.

Let’s see how that goes towards upping the engagement level. Given I’m one who rarely feels completely satisfied and is always looking for ways to adapt, enhance and improve… I optimistically wonder where this will take us.

2014 was all about building the foundation. 2015 will be all about putting up the house so that it comfortably fits us all.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/11/the-jobs-only-you-can-do.html

Sharing this awesome blog post…. “One of the milestones every entrepreneur passes is when she stops thinking of people she hires as expensive (“I could do that job for free”) and starts thinking of them as cheap (“This frees me up to do something more profitable.”)

When you get rid of every job you do that could be done by someone else, something needs to fill your time. And what you discover is that you’re imagining growth, building partnerships, rethinking the enterprise (working on your business instead of in it, as the emyth guys would say). Right now, you don’t even see those jobs, because you’re busy doing things that feel efficient instead.”

This concept really resonates with me as DMAI passes the milestone of one full year working on the invaluable.com account. One of my goals early on with this client was to find people to train and empower employees to take on more things as we grew. This freed me up to spend my time on other things and its worked like magic so far.

From my perspective one of the keys to being a successful entrepreneur is doing just what Seth’s talks about… focus your time on doing what no one else can do and delegate things that you don’t have to be the one doing. Managing Payroll. Recruiting. Operations Management. Business Development. All things I have passed off to my team so I can focus on other things.

And the coolest thing we are seeing now, one year in… is the ones who I’ve delegated too… my leadership team, are now doing the same. Passing off tasks to new employees so they can focus on what they do best.

Its a pretty exciting story to talk about! A true case of empowerment!