Leadership: Powerful tips to keep your employees motivated in home office

Leave a Comment / Leadership, Management / By Tim Lauenroth

Leadership in the home office presents different challenges. You need to make sure, your colleagues have set up their tech tools, defined their processes, and permanently logged into their video conferencing accounts. But this is only the basic prerequisite for working from home to work. Beyond that, above all, the factor of motivation is part of it!

So the manager must ask himself the question: How do I motivate my team to work from home and how can I support each employee in the best possible way?

To lay a foundation for answering the question, let’s look at the factors that lead to high motivation for employees.

There are two different types for motivating employees: intrinsic (purpose of work, freedom of action, development opportunities) and extrinsic (status, power, things) motivation. Both types can motivate employees.

Where is the approach of leadership in motivating employees in home office ?

It is primarily intrinsic motivation that managers can help their employees with. Moreover, intrinsic motivation factors are more sustainable than extrinsic ones. Too much attention to the extrinsic factors shifts the focus and, as a result, the quality of the individual employee’s work. For managers, this means in concrete terms that they should start with the purpose of the work, the freedom of action and decision-making, and the employee’s development opportunities in order to motivate him or her.

Recognize the problem of social isolation

The Covid 19 pandemic reaffirmed for many people the fact of how important social contact is to us. The pandemic has changed work for the community. Many now work only from home offices, leaving them at least physically isolated from other employees. This makes it all the more important to maintain contact with each other in order to keep up the momentum within the team. Especially in the joint implementation of projects, this is one of the decisive factors for success.

Team collaboration

The feeling of isolation of individual employees arises primarily when there is not enough support and a sense of togetherness. In the case of the manager, support refers primarily to trust in the employees or the ability to communicate and keep the team together.

This includes, above all, regular exchanges about the employee’s problems and current challenges. Actively asking questions can be very crucial for many employees in the home office, because the exchange within the team about the challenges of projects are significantly reduced by the remote working environment. Regularly checking in with colleagues allows the team to work together on solutions and builds a sense of togetherness.

Consequently, you can see that communication is the most important factor to motivate the team and each individual employee in the home office. Here are 4 specific tips on how you can strengthen the motivation of each employee to ensure even greater success within the team.

Motivation Tip #1: Conduct regular one-on-one meetings

Concrete possibilities that you have as a manager are weekly individual meetings with each employee, in which only the current situation is exchanged (problems, challenges, solution approaches, etc.). Through these exchanges, the manager gets a feel for the needs of each employee and can thus better lead the team. At the same time, the employee has a stronger sense of belonging as a result of the regular discussions and is therefore more motivated. The employee realizes how important he or she is to the success of the entire team.

Motivation Tip #2: Promote the meaning of work

Regularly remind your employees what each individual’s goals are and what you want to accomplish together as a team. By working at home and working in isolation, the meaning of work disappears more often than in the office. This makes it all the more important for managers to define deadlines and set milestones. The employees can be guided by these and know what they are doing their work for. Through meaningful activities, the motivation of each employee in the home office and the productivity within the team increases!

Motivation Tip #3: Provide the best tools

As mentioned at the beginning, providing technical tools is the basic requirement to keep employees motivated and enjoying their work. Employees perceive such conditions as very appreciative and get the certainty that their work is valued and considered important within the team. In concrete terms, for the home office this means providing employees with the best equipment (laptop, PC, headset, etc.) and the most effective tools.

Create a work environment for your employees where the tools and programs you use to work as a team are linked together in a way that automates many interfaces.

With the Microsoft365 environment, for example, you can build your individual network of tools and link your them to Microsoft programs and third-party apps like timeghost. You can expand and customize the network almost endlessly. Not only will you increase the productivity of your employees, but you will also increase their motivation, because they will have smooth processes and can fully concentrate on their work.

timeghost integrated in Microsoft Teams

Motivation Tip №4: Invest in building trust

“If people like you, they will listen to you. But if they trust you, they will do business with you.”

Zig Ziglar, American author

Nothing is more demotivating than a boss who is always trying to monitor and control you. Especially in a home office, don’t constantly call your coworkers to check in on their progress. The motivation killer is constant micromanagement.

This is where a time tracking tool like timeghost offers great solutions to give you an overview of each employee’s current tasks and projects. In doing so, you bypass micromanagement and can still make adjustments and improvements to the project process.

Build a foundation of trust with each employee. You can do this by learning about their emotional state and current work challenges, and offering to help them solve problems. At the same time, give them more ownership of the work at hand so they can continually improve their time management and skills.

Trust increases each employee’s motivation because it makes them feel even more cohesive. Employees know their importance within the team and each employee takes on more responsibility.

Conclusion

The key messages of this blog for improving your team’s motivation in the home office are:

Take an interest in the problems and needs of your employees.

Promote the meaning of work for each employee

Value the work of your employees by providing them with the best tools and tech resources available

Trust the skills and abilities of each team member and don’t micromanage them

Try it yourself

We really appreciate all the feedback we can get, so please feel free to contact us and tell us what needs improvement or what you are missing in timeghost.

If you need any help in setting up timeghost, please don’t hesitate to visit our Support Center or send us an email to support@timeghost.io.

Get the timeghost Teams App

You only need to install the timeghost Teams App directly from the AppSource Store in the application. You can find a manual on how to do this right here. The timeghost app includes all features that you know from the web client and since you use your Office 365 account in order to access timeghost you’re set and done in only a few seconds.