7 Motivational Tactics CEOs Can Use to Increase Employee Productivity (and Maximize Your Investment) Without Giving a Raise

When defining and building out your business growth, make sure your management team’s capabilities contribute to your objectives. Don’t promote based on need, instead hire based on a candidate’s previous experiences and his or her ability to take you to the next level. Avoid the Peter Principle — promoting employees into new positions above their level of competency which ultimately causes them to fail.

In today’s economy, your employees are one of the most expensive and least predictable business assets you have.

Once you have selected the right management team members to help your firm grow, you then want to protect this asset by increasing their personal productivity and job satisfaction. Here are seven tips to accomplish this:

• Send handwritten notes to employees every month thanking them for their help. These notes should be short, to-the-point, non-flowery, and sincere.
• Send restaurant gift certificates to employees who do a good job.
• Create unique management job titles for employees to make them feel good.
• Send thank-you gifts to spouses (i.e., flowers to women, movie tickets to men) to thank them for the spouses’ contributions to the company.
• Institute an Employee of the Month award. Announce winners at a company meeting or through the corporate newsletter.
• Give employees an office with a door.
• Establish an over-the-top employee of the month trophy, like a sports trophy, and have it passed along month to month.

If your management team has been promoted prematurely or does not have in-depth knowledge of industry best-practices and business growth methods your expansion potential is limited. And when you have a good team in place, don’t take that for granted — continue to motivate them.

The best corporate leaders never point out the window to blame external conditions; they look in the mirror and say ‘We are responsible for our results!’  —Jim Collins, Author of Good to Great