Home Health & Hospice Week

Unlock the secret that motivates your employees and unleash their productivity with this one tool.

Forget the frustration of figuring out which motivation or teaching method works for each individual on your team. Use this strategy to get employees to reveal what matters to them. Then you can meet their needs, and they’ll want to give their all.

Boost Employee Satisfaction with Action Plans

What to do: Convince your employees that they have a responsibility to "be responsive to feedback, keep their word with their bosses and always try to develop new skills," recommends Erika Andersen, author of Growing Great Employees: Turning Ordinary People Into Extraordinary Performers and founder of human resources consulting firm Proteus International. Set up formal means by which employees can monitor and demonstrate their proficiencies on these points.

Try this: Coach employees in their everyday job functions, urges Henry Kimsey-House, co-founder of the Coaches Training Institute in San Rafael, Calif.

Build structures into your relationships with your staff members, Kimsey-House says. "Almost everyone uses structures on a daily basis," he explains, such as to-do lists, calendars, schedules and day-timers. "These are the structures that move us successfully through our regular obligations and accomplishments."

To improve your team’s performance, expand these somewhat mundane structures to include regular coaching meetings that center on formal "communication instruments," as Kimsey-House calls them. These instruments could appear as forms for you and your employees to fill out separately and discuss together, he suggests.

Reinforce Company Culture Through Coaching

Both you and the employee can use the form to prepare in advance to discuss categories, such as the following, in a one-on-one meeting at least twice each year:

1. The employee’s recent accomplishments and what she does well.

Tip: Paying attention to the accomplishments the employee lists can give you insight into which aspects of her job she finds most rewarding, keeping her more engaged in her job and more willing to put extra effort into her tasks. You should use the accomplishments discussion to reinforce your company’s goals.

2. Any concerns the employee has about her own performance or the company.

Tip: Cultivate an atmosphere of open communication so employees feel comfortable discussing which areas they’d like to work on and anything going on in the company that they feel prevents them from performing their duties at maximum efficiency.

3. Any concerns you have related to the employee’s job performance.

Tip: Follow through on a promise to let employees know that if you find some aspect of their performance in need of improvement, you will tell them and take reasonable steps to help them improve. Offering feedback throughout the year prevents employees from feeling blind-sided by a poor annual performance review and helps them feel confident about their responsibilities to the team. Remember: Praise in public, coach in private.

4. Concrete goals for the near future and for the years to come.

Tip: The chance to take stock of the employee’s performance and define active steps for improvement and refinement is a major coaching benefit. Be specific when choosing goals.

Example: Have the employee commit to attend one seminar specific to her position within a specific timeframe. Or if the employee would like to learn more about another position in the company, have her commit to learning the position well enough that she can cover for the current employee in that position when necessary.