Just picked this up from Chartered Management Institute:

A team happily working together – at a team building day!

“Being able to motivate staff is one of the key management skills anyone who has recently been promoted must learn.

This is according to Andy Yates, an advisor and mentor for Huddlebuy.co.uk, a money saving site for small businesses.

He says that ensuring your employees are happy is one of the key steps in ensuring your business remains productive.

Indeed, as most of us spend the majority of our lives at work, ensuring that it is as enjoyable as possible is of the utmost importance.

Mr Yates believes one of the easiest ways to keep staff happy and motivated is to praise their work.

He told the Daily Mail: “Praise is a no-brainer for any boss. It costs nothing, it’s easy to give and it means a lot. So why have so many bosses not got the brains to praise their employees more often when they achieve and improve?”

He added that communicating company visions and values and getting the employees to buy into them is also key for any business.”

I like the sentiment, and the ideas of how to are not extensive, and not really rocket science.  The bit that gets in the way, as far as I am concerned, is usually our own experience (or lack of it) in receiving praise ourselves.  We start by thinking “Do they mean me?”, then maybe cynically think “What do they want?” or end up simpering “It was nothing really”.  So try it.  As the One Minute Manager said many years ago “Catch people doing something right – and tell them so”.

The Vision and Values thing is perhaps a little more difficult.  To treat this aspect of the business as if it was owned and forged in the senior management team is to miss an obvious trick, and to make an obvious problem for yourselves.  If the rest of the team aren’t involved in creating these commandments, it will be much harder to engage them in living them and making them happen.  The top team do not have a monopoly on good ideas.

Share, and get people involved.  And remember, praise people when they come up with great suggestions!