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The Keys to Motivating Your Nonprofit Employees

The Keys to Motivating Your Nonprofit Employees
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Once you’ve decided to start working in the nonprofit sector, you may begin thinking about what steps to take for the purpose of optimizing your results. One strategy that can definitely help you enhance your likelihood of making your nonprofit successful is keeping your employees motivated. Below you’ll find several key strategies that can help you do so:

1. Find Out What Gets Them Motivated.

As noted in Sumac, research indicates that not all individuals who enter the non-sector domain do so for financial gain. Some people are motivated by other factors such as purpose or passion. With this reality in mind, make sure that you’re having open, honest conversations with your employees regarding who they are and what they’re trying to get out of the job. This is one of the most straightforward ways to ensure that you know how to keep them going and growing during challenging times.

2. Ongoing Training.

In addition to finding out what gets your employees motivated, make sure that you enroll them in customized, ongoing training. This technique has a two-fold effect. First, it shows the employee that you are genuinely interested in her or his personal and professional growth. This builds trust and motivates the employee to work harder based on an understanding that you truly care about them. Additionally, enrolling staff members in training will increase their skill set. This builds confidence and competence, thereby increasing the likelihood that the employee will attain substantive results. Once the employee sees their own growth and ability to generate results on behalf of the team, she or he will likely undergo a substantive increase in motivation. As noted in Entrepreneur, it’s prudent to develop a needs analysis when you implement training strategies. The needs analysis will help you determine what you want to change in your company or in the performance of your staff members as a result of the training.

3. One-On-One Meetings.

One final strategy that you can implement to keep your employees on track to remaining motivated is one-on-one meetings. During these meetings, you can have meaningful, relatively lengthy conversations with the employee. As you communicate with the employee, you can ask specific and general questions that help you gauge her or his frustrations, level of satisfaction, concerns, etc. Once you have attained this information, you’ll be able to determine which strategies or changes need to be made to keep the employee motivated.

Once you realize that you want your nonprofit company to become as successful as possible, know that there are many ways that you can realize the objective. One is by optimizing each employee’s level of motivation. Implement one, two, or all three of the motivation optimization strategies outlined above to ensure that your nonprofit remains on track to enhanced profitability, progress, and power!