How to Keep Teams Motivated to Generate New Ideas

Do you know how to keep your team motivated? It’s not an easy task because there are several different factors that might contribute, or not, to developing a collaborative and innovative environment inside your business. 

On the other hand, despite the difficulties to keep employees engaged, motivation is necessary to develop new ideas that are important to promote your company’s growth, considering innovation is one of the key secrets of successful companies. 

To show you how important this topic is, we will explain in this post about the main benefits of keeping your teams motivated and we will provide tips that might help you to maintain your teams engagement with the development of new ideas. 

What Are the Benefits of Keeping Your Team Motivated?

Developing an innovative culture inside the company can encourage employees to work with the intention to optimize the business’ performance, to innovate, and to improve practices and work processes. 

Besides that, it is important to note that organizations that adopt that kind of innovative culture tend to present a wider market view, to be more sustainable, and to be prepared to deal with unexpected situations.

It is also important to note that companies that can keep employees motivated are more likely to innovate. That happens because there is a bigger generation of valuable ideas and therefore, it becomes possible to manage them and put the best ones into practice. 

How Do You Keep Your Team Motivated?

To keep the entire team engaged with the processes and purposes of the company might not be such an easy task, since people may have different characteristics and motivations. However, there are some practices that could help you promote an innovative environment in your business. Encouraging employee autonomy, investing in diversity and rewarding new ideas are some of these practices. We’ll approach these matters closely below.  

Encouraging Employee Autonomy

Employees should be considered as partners in the development of new ideas and solutions. They should give their opinions and participate in the processes. A great way to do this is by giving employees greater autonomy and establishing clear goals to be met. Therefore, the whole team will be engaged to develop ways to achieve them.

In this process, it is essential to have a tolerance for errors. This is probably one of the main features of a company that is willing to try innovative solutions. The team has to be encouraged to exploit initiatives and to share ideas with no fear of making mistakes. Make it clear that it is okay to make mistakes and reinforce that innovating involves making mistakes and learning from them continuously. This is part of the process and it provides insights that could help your company to be ready to deal with new challenges. Besides that, mistakes might generate improvement, accelerate learning, and the implementation of corrective measures.

Invest in Diversity

Explaining why diversity is effective in a company is not a hard task. Similar people tend to think in similar ways. Thus, the more diverse an environment is, the greater the chances are of distinct solutions being proposed to face the same challenge. Diversity allows different backgrounds to unite to solve challenges, while simultaneously bringing varying perspectives. 

Encourage Brainstorming

Listening and providing space to everyone to share their ideas is an essential part of the process. Make sure you provide enough time and space so your team can present and discuss their ideas. 

During company meetings, take some time so the team can show their ideas and provide different points of view. It is more likely for new ideas and innovative proposals to come up in a more comfortable, open environment. 

Using digital workspaces to encourage brainstorming is usually an effective practice to promote debate and the development of promising proposals. There are several different digital workspaces (including free options) available that could contribute to increasing team participation. 

Reward Ideas

It is also important to encourage your team to develop new ideas and reward them for their initiative. That could be done in several different ways, such as recognition, a small bonus, offering awards, and other actions that could show how much their participation was appreciated by the company. Rewarding your team is considered one of the best ways to encourage teamwork and to appreciate their participation.  

Promote Team Integration

We spend most of our time at work, however, depending on our daily routine, it could be really hard for the employees to get to know each other. It is up to you as a leader to promote and encourage integration between your team.

You might be wondering, how could that be so important for business? The union between the professionals helps to spread the feeling of importance and appreciation and allows you to establish a more productive and efficient communication within the company. 

To achieve this you could use ordinary moments like meetings. Instead of having separate talks with your employees, try bringing them all together every so often to increase the feeling of being a part of a greater team. To really tap into this, take the first few minutes of a meeting to get them to engage in personal conversation and share important things about their lives that aren’t necessarily professionally related. Of course the conversation needs to stay “professional” in some sense, however, personal engagement helps them each relate to one another, encouraging integration and team cohesiveness. 

Provide Feedback

Giving feedback can be a great opportunity to suggest professional improvements. It’s important that this process happens individually, giving you the freedom to appreciate their strengths while also suggesting personal improvements that can help them become even more productive. Giving constructive feedback can help a team, or individuals, achieve better results. 

Celebrate Victories

Moments of celebration are an excellent opportunity to show appreciation for good results and reinforce the team’s capabilities. Victories can not go unseen and must be celebrated. A couple of great ways of showing the company’s appreciation for a team’s victory are taking the team out for lunch or even a happy hour celebration.

Keeping your team motivated might not be an easy task, however, it is easily one of the most important practices of successful companies. This allows you to support the development of new and innovative practices, allowing the emergence of new unique, and innovative ideas. Besides that, products tend to meet customer’s needs, which could benefit from a more motivational and encouraging work environment.