 Working out how to motivate your best employees can be quite intimidating and challenging as a manager. Your best employees, when motivated and focused, make an outsized contribution to what the team produces or the team results. A study published in Personal Psychology involving over 600,000 data points showed the top 5% of performers produced 26% of the company's output, or 400% more than the average, while being paid around 20% more than the average. Other studies returned similar results. The more complex the job, the bigger the impact on the company's performance the top performers have over average performers. Motivated employees contribute more. How to motivate your best employees to get more from them and to keep them for longer makes a massive difference to the team, to the company, and you, the manager. We're covering today five factors that motivate all employees and eight ways to motivate your best employees plus at the end sharing tips on how to avoid motivating one group while demotivating other groups. Motivating employees, whatever their skill level requires the manager to know their staff and understand what the gap is between the employees current situation and their aspirations and how the manager can bridge that gap. Every person is different. There is not a one size fits all. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here Enhance.training shares people management expertise resources and courses to speed up your journey to becoming a great manager. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as the video timestamps so do take a look at these. And if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Through their behaviors decisions and actions leaders and managers have a huge impact on team motivation and influence the culture of the organization or how employees treat each other. The biggest impact in motivating employees and ensuring that they are happy is how they're treated by their leaders and their colleagues. Here are five factors to motivate all employees. There are a lot of factors that go into motivating employees and getting more from the team members. Every employee prioritizes differently the factors that motivate them as an individual. In my experience these five factors are on everyone's list of what motivates them. Employees want to be trusted and respected. Trust is allowing employees to make decisions in their areas of expertise. It is listening to their ideas and acting on them. It is giving them true responsibility and autonomy. Trust is displayed through your decisions actions and policies rather than the words said. Secondly employees want to be treated fairly and equally. Some examples of fairness include ensuring the same rules apply equally to all the same pay for the same role and performance the same access to benefits training opportunities job flexibility and so on. The manager needs to be disciplined to apply consistency of behavior decisions and actions to each employee in their team and managers need to be seen as being consistent too. The third way to motivate is spend time listening to employees. This is more than just active listening. To manage well you must connect with all types of people and get to know them and keep their interests and ambitions in mind when delegating work and making decisions. Listening also includes really considering employees ideas and suggestions and acting on the good ones. Focus on finding the best ideas regardless of where they come from. And listening is also about being open to changing your mind because of what they tell you. Fourth spend part of each week focused on removing problems team members or the whole team are experiencing. Everyone loves a manager that cares enough to take action to remove pointless processes or tasks and activities that are distracting in terms of reaching team goals or poorly performing staff or disruptive staff. In fact anything that makes getting the best from the team members harder. The fifth way to motivate employees is to be there for them. It demonstrates that you have their back through supporting them when they need help or fighting their corner so they get the resources they need or protecting the team from company politics and changing priorities. Demonstrate that you are loyal to your team and are working to make their lives at work easier and better. Now let's cover how to motivate your best employees. As mentioned previously find out what your employees want what their professional interests and ambitions are and how you can help best help them on their path to achieving those ambitions. The first way to motivate your best employees is to provide a tailored development plan or career plan and proactively and visibly work to deliver the development opportunities that you've committed to. They know you are working to further their career. This is a great way of keeping your best employees. The second way to motivate high performers is to highlight what they're going to learn with each task, activity or project that you give them. This takes a little bit of thought and effort on your part. Spelling out how they're going to improve reminds your best employees how you are helping them. The third way to motivate your best employees is to delegate problems not tasks. The better team members usually want and need challenge and to feel that they are using and improving their skills. Delegating problems helps your best employees practice leadership, problem solving, decision making, organising, negotiating and a host of other skills. Just delegating tasks with all the solution phases already done deprives the best team members of challenge and development opportunity, which is very demotivational. The fourth way to motivate your best employees is focus on giving them responsibility and autonomy. Practically, this is making sure that you stay out of their way, that you don't make decisions for them, that you provide support through coaching rather than telling. And publicly, it is giving the better performers authority and the resources to deliver the goals without needing additional permission and input from you. The fifth action to motivate your best performers is demonstrating that they are valued. There are so many ways to do this, you know, publicly praise them or give them fun rewards like, you know, time off or meals out with their partners, or ask them to teach other team members. Or fourth, you could ask them to challenge solutions and then listen carefully to what they say. Or fifth, ask for their opinions and suggestions. Sixth, ask them to lead problem solving groups. Think of all the ways that you can demonstrate through your actions and decisions that you value your best employees. The sixth way to motivate your best employees is making the time to provide really useful feedback. The better performers want and need feedback so they can carry on improving what they are doing. Don't give them bland or unhelpful feedback. Make your feedback well thought out and very specific. Explaining well thought out reasons for the feedback and include the impacts of what they have done. And don't forget to challenge them to come up with better options for use next time. The seventh way to motivate your best employees is to help them raise their profile with more senior management layers within the organization. A higher profile within management circles tends to lead to more and better development opportunities, helping advice and feedback from a wider range of people and a higher chance of promotion sooner. All these are very motivational for high performers. The eighth way in how to motivate your best team members is to make sure that their pay rises and bonuses are higher than those of averagely performing employees. Move away from binary bonus schemes for your best performers, where they either pass or don't pass their goals. Create a ladder of increasing bonus levels for corresponding rising goals instead. And focus the pay differential more on bonuses rather than salary levels, as this is less likely to demotivate averagely performing staff members. Use these behaviors and actions in getting the best from team members. How to retain your best employees must include consistently rewarding great performance. Motivating and keeping your best employees makes a huge difference to your team's performance and your job as a manager. And as promised, here are tips to avoid motivating one group while demotivating other groups. As a manager and leader, you are always undertaking a careful balancing act. If focusing too much on developing and rewarding your best employees can create resentment and demotivate all your other employees. This is as bad as treating your best employees in the same way as you treat your worst employees. I would suggest creating opportunities for all team members to grow, learn, progress and be rewarded. Give everyone the opportunity and access to get better rewards and opportunities, but tie them carefully and consistently to how each person performs. When you're open and consistent about how you develop and reward staff in exchange for different levels of performance, then it is the employee's choice as to where they want to be on that scale. I found this reduces the risk of creating unfairness, tensions and resentment. So be open, fair and consistent with your opportunity and reward. So in summary, creating the environment to motivate team members to do their best work is a key part of the manager's job. Learning how to motivate your best employees will help you get the best from them while keeping your best employees for longer. This is very much in your interests as well as your team and company's interests. The best employees deliver more than 400% more than an average employees per studies. This is a big differential in performance for an average of around 20% more in pay. And we've covered five factors that motivate all employees and eight ways to motivate your best employees, plus at the end we've gone through tips on avoiding motivating one group while demotivating other groups. If you have any questions on how to motivate your best employees, please leave them in the comments section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.