Motivating employees is perhaps one of the greatest challenges that employers face. Different employees are motivated by different things. But there are a few basic methods that work for all. Here’s a list of the top 10 ways that you can use to ensure that your entire workforce is properly motivated. After all, happy employees are a prime requisite for successful enterprises.

1. Spend Time with your Employees
   Make time to listen to your employees. Keeping your ear to the ground is very important for running a successful business. This will also keep the channels of communication open, and help develop trust and cooperation in the organization.
2. Promote an Environment of Openness
   Employees enjoy their jobs when they find their workplace fun. An open environment that is conducive to new ideas and initiatives helps to keep people in a positive frame of mind.
3. Put the Right People in the Right Jobs
   This is very important as people perform best when they are the right match for their jobs. Use objective and cost-effective tools like employee assessments to ensure that you hire the correct people for your organization’s culture and job requirements.
4. Suitably Reward Good Performers
   Your best performers should always be rewarded appropriately and soon. Else you risk losing your best people to the competition.
5. Share Information with your Employees
   Employees feel better when they know how their work affects the entire organization, and how they fit into the overall plan. If they are in sync with the organization’s vision and plans, they tend to feel more committed and perform at higher levels.
6. Be Specific while Providing Feedback
   People perform better when they know what they need to do in order to better their performance. Vague and general feedback is not very helpful, so take time to let people know exactly what they are doing right, and what specifically they can do better.
7. Thank People Personally
   Look for opportunities to give your employees praise and recognition for their performance. Let them know that you appreciate their efforts and reward high levels of performance. This will ensure that you are helping to build actual commitment from your employees.
8. Help Create a Culture of Involvement
   Help your employees develop a sense of ownership in the company and their work. Involving people in the day to day decision making process will give them a say in the affairs of the organization, and provide them with a feeling of involvement and inclusion.
9. Encourage Team Building and Collaboration
   Encourage people to build cohesive team efforts. Look for opportunities where your employees can not only partner with each other, but with employees in other parts of the organization. Encourage collaborative efforts whenever appropriate.
10. Help Employees to Grow and Learn
    Good employees love to learn and grow; make sure you provide them with the means to do so. Help people learn new skills that will lead to their personal enrichment and overall professional development. You will have better employees, higher performance levels, and a more competitive business to meet future challenges.

The key to creating an effective workforce is to develop the top talent in your organization.

‘Employee development’ initiatives help employees work better and smarter, create greater employee loyalty, and boost your bottom-line.

To develop the key talent in our organization, follow these six steps.

6 Steps to Developing Key Talent in Your Organization:

1. Determine the required outcomes – What are you trying to accomplish? Write down your key requirements so you can focus on the critical issues. Determine how your people can help you achieve your goals. Help your key employees get on the same page so that they can work towards a clear and common vision.

2. Identify the gaps in performance expectations – You need to find the gap between desired performance and actual outcomes. What aren’t employees doing what they are suppose to be doing? Do they not understand what they should be doing? Do they not have the necessary skills to do their jobs? Are they not motivated to meet the performance standards that must be met to stay competitive? Has the communication of these standards not been clearly spelled out? It is very important to identify the gaps and work towards solving these issues. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link, so this step is critical to identify and understand why certain individuals are no measuring up to the organization’s performance expectations.

3. Simplify organizational processes – Often, individual performance is hamstrung by unnecessary organizational processes. Find out how the processes can be simplified to make it easier for employees to deliver optimal performance. Make sure that all employees have the resources to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Remove any obstacles and roadblocks that are slowing your employees down and hindering their performance.

4. Ensure the right job match – Your key talents can only shine if they are properly matched to their jobs. When an employee’s work style is not aligned with the requirements of his or her job then problems will eventually arise. Use employee assessments to assess employee’s key skills, interests, attitudes, work ethics, values, and work styles so that you can determine the best fit for every individual. This will result in a streamlined organization that can meet even the most difficult of challenges and still be successful.

5. Enhance individual performance – Organizational productivity is a sum of individual productivity. So focus on each individual’s development so that your organization grows as a whole. Key employee development contributes to individual effectiveness by providing each person with a comprehensive assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. Assessments can provide focus on employee developmental issues by building specific plans of action, creating a coaching relationship with a mentor, and providing an opportunity for follow-up evaluations of an individual’s progress in terms of continually improving performance levels.

6. Quantify the results – Measurement is a must. Unless you can measure your benefits, you cannot determine how much you’ve achieved or how much still needs to be done. It also shows what is working and what is not.

How you develop your human capital is the single greatest predictor of your organizational performance. The quality of employee talent directly contributes your organization’s ability to gain and maintain a competitive advantage.

Focus on these 6 steps and you’ll be well on your way to developing the key talent in your organization, and towards creating a competitive advantage in your marketplace.