8 ways to motivate your workers and increase productivity

Here are some top tips to ensure you get your feedback right and manage your staff effectively, every time:

Thank you and Praise

Say thank you for contributions, day to day tasks done very well and for extra projects undertaken.
Praise their efforts and let them know you understand how much work was involved.

Be enthusiastic

Take real interest in employee’s goals. discuss how they can achieve this, empathise and encourage employee to develop and improve their skills, keep trying and never give up.

Recognise your employee’s contribution

Explaining to employee how their work contributes to the running of the organisation, give specific examples, will ohelp them understand how to do the job better.

Be clear and concise

Collect your comments into meaningful sets to make them easier to digest. Start each set with praise for what the employee did well and then make constructive suggestions as appropriate. For instance, a writing project could be broken down into content, impact, structure and accuracy.

Give examples and explain their impact

If you want your employee to change their behaviour, you should give an example of the behaviour you want them to change. For example, if the person often arrives late to meetings, give instances of when this behaviour occurred. Point out the ways that their lateness has affected other members of the team and/or the business.

Listen

Allow your employee to tell their side of the story – there may have been genuine reasons behind their behaviour, rather than a careless attitude. Make sure that any request to change is made in a non-aggressive manner and take their comments into consideration. Both the giver and receiver of the feedback should walk away feeling that a fair resolution was achieved.

Don’t compare their work to yours

Ask yourself if the person’s performance was adequate for the purpose, rather than comparing it with how you would have done it. For example, if you are reviewing a piece of writing, think about whether it will do the job it was intended to do, rather whether you’d have written it that way. People can be demotivated by ‘red pen’, and they will not be able to learn from comments they do not understand.

The suggestion sandwich

Start with positive comments about the person’s strengths and successes. Follow this with constructive suggestions about how to perform even better, allowing them to comment and ask questions. Finally, bring in some additional positive points and encourage them to feel motivated to introduce the changes you have suggested.
Many business owners find delivering what they might call “negative feedback” difficult, but by following these suggestions, both employee and employer can leave a feedback session feeling they have gained from the experience.

Mairead Dillon and Jane Penson are both members of Toastmasters International, a worldwide not-for-profit organisation focused on developing communication and leadership skills

I found this great and very useful article on Forbes written by Joshua Steimle titled, 'The top 3 tips from a LinkedIn Expert' and wanted to share it with my readers. It's contains some dos and don'ts  when trying to build a connection with a possible future business associate.

Image from sitetrail

I’ve been a user and fan of LinkedIn for several years and am currently enjoying reading The Startup of You by LinkedIn co-Founder Reid Hoffman. Although it has its detractors and plenty of room for improvement, LinkedIn has become perhaps the most widely used business tool since email itself. And yet even if it’s used, how many of us use it correctly, or to its full potential? Many people set up a profile, connect with some friends, and then leave it at that. Another class of LinkedIn users are much more active, but perhaps too active, spamming their connections and LinkedIn groups with get-rich-quick schemes or articles, the posting of which is designed more to bring attention to the one doing the posting than to provide any true value to LinkedIn users.

Recently I met Alex Pirouz, a successful entrepreneur and author. In talking with Alex I learned he was featured in the book Getting Your Business LinkedIn, so I asked him to give me his top three LinkedIn tips. Here they are, in Alex’s own words:

1. Value Bank

Connecting and effectively communicating with people through LinkedIn is no different than dealing with people outside of the network. Whether they are a supplier, potential partner or customer you need to build enough value for them to trust you in order for them to grow an interest in your company and therefore your product/service. I call this: Value Bank.

I can’t recall how many times I have accepted a connection invite from someone to then receive an email marketing spiel about who they are, what they can do for me and how much it is going to cost me.  Oh and I forgot to mention that none of this was addressed to me personally, no name at the top of the email.


To be successful on LinkedIn and in business overall you have to add value first. Just because they accepted your connection invite doesn’t mean they are interested in what you have to say, remember this quote: “To be interesting you have to be interested.”

Before you start emailing marketing to your contacts, think of a few ways you could add value to them. For example it may be that within your connections there are about 100 accountants of whom you have recently connected and would like to potentially partner with. Your first email could be a sending a link to a recent article you read/noticed in SMH. This shows you were thinking of him/her. Your second email could be a FREE Ebook you have found that helps accountants generate more business etc.

This will help develop the trust and rapport necessary between your connection so that when you contact them to hold a meeting they not only recognize you but most importantly interested.

2. Connecting with a purpose

Building your connections for the sake of having a large following is not really a sound strategy if you want to effectively grow your business using LinkedIn. Every connection needs to be linked to your goals and objectives in business both now and in the future.

Before growing your network on LinkedIn take a step back and think about some of the goals you would like to achieve within your business over the next year or so. With these goals in mind now think about who you need to connect with in order to help you achieve those goals. For example when I first started using LinkedIn I just launched my business advisory service and given I had no personal brand other then my results in business I knew this was one of the areas I needed to develop.

And as many of you would know one way to build your brand is through PR. With this goal in mind I then connected with over 500 journalist, editors and bloggers online and in a space of a couple of months I managed to get featured in over 40 publications and now write for a few business magazines.


3. Segmenting your connections

I learnt the importance of segmenting your connections the hard way. Within my first 6 months of using LinkedIn I had connected with over 1000 people within 3 different industries: Media, Accounting & Events.

My aim was to use the media contacts to get some PR exposure, Accounting connections to create a few joint venture relationships and connections within the events industry to hopefully get some speaking gigs.

There was just one problem though: All my connections were mixed in with one another, not by choice but by default. You see, little to my knowledge I wasn’t aware that all new connections are automatically tagged under a folder which LinkedIn calls: Untagged.

I knew that in order for me to reach any level of success I would have to personalize my communication and because I could not properly assess who was who quickly within the tags section I had to go through the entire (1000) connections in the untagged folder and re-tag them accordingly.

Whilst it was tedious and frustrating at the best of times it was also very empowering. By the end of the process I knew precisely how many connections I had in each industry, which therefore helped me effectively communicate my message.

Learn from my mistake, before adding even one more connection take one step back and segment your connections so you can take 2 steps forward.

Get Personal And Social With Your Marketing Efforts

The infographic below shows some interesting stats on Social growth.

Image from garetcase.com

5 tips on marketing by Garet Case: 

Social provides us with a platform that makes our audience feel special, feel loved and not feel like they were 1 of 29 Billion people that just got the same email.

1: So, ensure your email is targeted and relevant before pushing send and that the receiver's data is accurate. ‘Mr Do Not Email’ I’m sure would approve.


2: Invest time in researching and then connecting with your customer and prospect base on social channels like Twitter and LinkedIn. Then market to them individually on these platforms. Yes it’s time consuming but just watch the results. Suddenly you will have an engaged audience, you can tweak the content and messages on an individual basis and that will lead to a much more successful campaign.

3: The Facebook Generation are email adverse. 10 years from now the senior decision maker community will be socially genetic. We need to understand this and start building proper social marketing strategies to help us differentiate when this shift change occurs. It’s occurring already by the way…

There really is no excuse not to get personal and social with your marketing efforts. 

Content Marketing Strategy

Simply put:

1. Who are your target audience?
2. Where would you find them/ where do they hang out? For instance, do they have a group on Facebook. Listen into their discussions - what are their problems and questions?
3. Research eg: via discussion groups (specializing in the area in question) and Using the information garnered and what you already know, figure out the answer to your audience's questions and how you can solve their problems
4. Feed back answers to said questions and problems, this helps gradually build trust and confidence in your target audience as insightful, helpful, relevant.
5. Develop an online presence e.g: via blog, webinars, YouTube videos where you can share relevant content and point people to access information directly relevant to their needs/ problems.
6. This makes it easy for people to buy from you as they start seeing you as an expert or knowledgeable in the field they are interested in or in knowing how to solve their problem

10 Habits on how to Build Self Confidence by Shaa Wasmund

How to build self confidence? Can you fake it til you make it or is it something you are just born with? What happens if you were short changed in the genetic confidence gene pool? Simple, you create new habits to build a rock solid, inner confidence that other people can’t shake and here’s my starter for ten:

1. Focus on what you really want, what you really love, who you really want to be … and become world class at it. Stop trying to please everyone. You can’t. No one can. Focus on the people and things that really matter. Less energy. More results.

2. Stop slouching. Seriously. Stand up tall. Hiding in the background isn't for you. Your posture says a lot about you. Makes sure it says the right things: “Hi, I’d love to talk to you. I bet we've both got something interesting to learn from each other.”

3. Be your own cheerleader. You can’t expect anyone to have confidence in you if you don’t have confidence in yourself first. If you really struggle with being your own cheerleader … repeat point 1 and I GUARANTEE that will change.

4. Exercise. It’s not about losing weight (although that might be something that holds you back) its actually the endorphins that exercising produces in the body. It’s like a happy drug. And when you’re happy, you are naturally more confident. Strong, lean muscles also help with standing tall!

5. Take care of yourself. Dress well (in your own style, not someone else’s). Wear clothes that make you feel confident. Get a hair cut regularly. Throw out old clothes. Buy nice shoes.

6. Prepare. Now, I’m a kinda ‘lastminute.com’ kinda gal BUT I know I am ALWAYS more confident when I am fully prepared. So don’t do as I do, do as I say – prepare! When you know what you are talking about, what you’re going to wear, how you’re going to make the presentation, who you are meeting, what their background and interests are, when you have the ‘inside track’ and have done everything in your power to prepare; you deserve to be confident. No one can ‘catch’ you out. You've done your homework.

7. Practise slowing your voice down. When we are nervous, our voices naturally become faster and more high pitched. Practise slowing it down – it might sound strange to you at first, but trust me, speak 25% slower and it will help your breathing and ground you.

8. Smile. It naturally helps people connect with you. When you connect, you feel more confident.

9. Ask for help. We typically feel less confident about the things we’re not so sure about. For example if you’re asked to do a business presentation, but hate doing PowerPoint or Keynote, you will spend time and energy worrying about using the clicker, whether the fonts will look right instead of the content itself. But, if you are an expert in using mind maps, you come into your own and are happy to help anyone with creating theirs. So, now it’s your turn to ask for help on the things you need to feel more confident about.

10. Start! Yes, that’s it … just start! Nothing changes until you do, so start changing some habits today.

What habits work for you?

Shaa Wasmund
info@shaa.com