A complacent employee will do their job at the bare minimum and then go home. They are there mostly for the paycheck, not to further your business or bring innovative ideas or talents. In some cases, this works fine.But, if you want to benefit from a workforce that cares about your business’ success and wants to help push your company to new heights, then you need to implement these 5 methods to stoke the fires of ambition in your employees:
Hire, Move and Promote Internally
Those up the career ladder likely know what they want and what they are good at. Entry and mid-level employees, however, have yet to find that certainty. That is why a great way to encourage ambition and hard work amongst the lower-level employees is to give them some freedom.
Allow employees to shadow other departments and change horizontally as positions become open. Being passionate about what you do is key to staying ambitious, so giving employees the freedom to figure out where their talents lie is only going to prove beneficial to your business. It is also worthwhile to keep comprehensive progress reports on your employees. That way, if an employee meets the qualifications you are looking for in a new hire, you can promote internally. The chance at onwards progression will encourage more employees to work hard. If you only ever hire new people from the outside to fill in higher-level positions, then you won’t encourage that hard work from your staff.
Reward on Individual Merits
Never pit your employees against each other. This will only make the hard workers more competitive and the ones who are not ready to put that much time and effort in to stop trying. Instead, reward on individual merits. Make these clear and standardize them across the board.
In general, you will want to make these rewards available based on effort, rather than, say, time working for you. This will encourage every single person to try harder, put more effort in and generally get more involved with your business.
Sponsor Skill and Learning Opportunities
You won’t be able to promote or move every employee who deserves it, but that doesn’t mean you cannot offer them advancement opportunities of some kind. One great way is to sponsor education and skill training. Some training programs allow employees to complete multiple stages of a certification at once. With Six Sigma, for example, you would be able to have some employees work towards their Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification at the same time as another employee works towards his or her black belt certification.
Create a Comprehensive Employee Review Portal
Each employee ought to have a profile that you can access. It should have progress reports, skills they know and excel at, and more. This way, you can easily monitor how they are doing, reward them for going the extra mile, and be able to keep track of who has the skills necessary for a promotion. When your employees know that their performance is being so closely documented by their superiors, and there are rewards for good work, they will put more effort into their career.
