How to Motivate Employees Without Spending More

If you are a small business owner, keeping your employees motivated is one of the biggest challenges you will face. Small business often does not have the money to provide frequent raises or bonuses to employees, yet you need to keep your employees happy, motivated, and functioning at the highest levels-an ambitious employee with great interpersonal skills could potentially bring in millions of dollars in additional revenue each year.

How can you keep your employees motivated, short of paying them a commission on everything they do? The key is to provide the following: inclusion, autonomy, and responsibility. Inclusion means the employee feels like a part of the team; autonomy means the employee enjoys a high level of independence and does not have to "answer" to you or anyone else unless absolutely necessary; responsibility means the employee gets to make a lot of executive decisions on their own. If you constantly require employees to run every small or medium-sized decision past you for approval, you are cutting off a great source of potential talent. They will turn into robots, doing whatever you wish. While this may gratify your ego, it is no way to run a profitable and dynamic company. Giving out responsibility is crucial-it also gives you more free time to pursue higher-level aspects of the business. Also consider doing the following, if you haven't already:

Give out corporate email addresses

Each employee should have an account such as firstname.lastname@yourcompanyname.com. Also, encourage employees to have a professional email signature line, which can include their fax line or a dedicated work number. If employees are simply using Gmail or another free service to send work-related email, they may not be as professional. Also, they won't feel like a representative of your company's brand. Giving out corporate email addresses is a great way to make them feel like part of the team.

Don't micro-manage

As long as someone is meeting their sales goals, let them figure out the best way to approach their task. Don't "follow up" with them every ten minutes-trust them to figure things out (if they weren't intelligent, you would not have hired them in the first place, right?)

Give them business cards, company stationery, etc.

This is done for the same reason as the corporate email addresses-it builds inclusion, enhances your company's image, and makes employees realize they are part of a bigger mission.

Give public praise

Occasionally name-dropping your highest performing employees in company press releases and in sent-to-all companywide email announcements will do a lot to boost morale. Good employees will realize that you recognize (and reward) talent when you see it-this will also encourage more "quiet" employees to speak up and boost their sales levels.