How to Ignite Passion in Your Employees Without Burning Them Out

Almost every business website or blog out there has at least one post about employee motivation. No doubt it’s an incredibly popular topic because every intelligent business leader realizes that employees that self-motivate do better work than their peers that do not. However, all the talk about the importance of motivation doesn’t always segue into solutions on how to ignite passion in your employees.

Maybe you feel totally lost when it comes to motivating your employees. Perhaps you’re not completely lost, but you’re also not sure how you can translate the popular perks of Google or Zappos into your own company. Maybe you’ve read up on employee motivation techniques and are ready to try them. Wherever you are on the spectrum, igniting passion in your employees without burning them is about recognizing what really matters to your company.

Know What Really Matters to Your Employees

You can’t ignite someone’s passion without knowing the things that they’re passionate about in the first place. That means that before you can motivate your employees, you have to take time to get to know them. At any given time, you should be able to answer two basic questions about any of your employees:

• Where does the employee want to go?
• What are we doing to help the employee get there?

Imagine there’s an employee in your HR department who wants to launch her own recruiting agency in the future. To ignite her passion, you can include her in meetings with recruiters and loop her in when your department is making important recruiting decisions.

Understanding what your individual employees really want out of the job will help you find effective motivation strategies. Of course, there are more general motivation strategies that you can use as well. It’s a given that being recognized for their achievements and contributions is something that most employees want. Launching or redesigning your organization’s recognition program can be an efficient way to motivate your employees as a whole.

Manage to Ignite Passion

Igniting passion in the workplace also means being a passionate manager. After all, your employees look to you for direction and advice. If you’re not passionate about what you do, they won’t be passionate about what they do either. Make sure that your team knows that you care about supporting them.

Managing to ignite passion is all about making sure that your employee’s stress or boredom levels are not too high. As a leader or manager, it’s your responsibility to:

• make sure that your team always has an interesting problem to work on
• give your team some freedom to experiment when it comes to solving business problems
• protect your employees from projects that encroach on big things they’re trying to accomplish for your company
• remove as many unnecessary meetings and distractions from the workday as possible
• spread tedious tasks between your team as evenly as possible.

Of course, a big part of igniting passion in your employees is keeping them in the loop. At Zappos, one of the most praised workplaces in the world, executives and their employees share a common workspace without doors. That level of transparency impresses employees, and it motivates them because they know that the employer truly values what they do.

Here at Cristaux International, we’re passionate about what we do because we constantly accept new challenges. It’s no different with your top employees. When you let someone know that you trust them and are invested in them, they’ll do amazing things for you. It’s the underlying philosophy at successful business such as Zappos and Google, and it will serve your business well too.