5 Ways to Motivate Your Engineering Staff
Posted September 20th, 2019
Keeping your engineering staff engaged is critical. Not only will it enhance productivity, but it will also improve retention, ensuring your best and brightest remain on your team. If you want to motivate your engineering team, here are five ways to do just that.
- Offer Autonomy
While managers often delegate tasks to their engineers, giving them the freedom to approach each task in their own way can be incredibly motivating. It will provide your engineering team with a sense of ownership over the work and allow them to select approaches that best align with their skills and preferences.
If a specific parameter or method isn’t critical for the assignment, trust in your engineer’s ability to select a suitable path to completion. Autonomy is incredibly empowering and works wonders when it comes to motivation.
- Provide Flexible Career Growth Paths
Not all career progression is highly linear. While some of your engineers might want to follow a tried and true path that allows them to advance in the company, others may have other goals in mind. As a result, embracing a less rigid approach to professional development and advancement can be incredibly beneficial, as it motivates your engineering team to take their career in a direction that best suits them.
- Adopt a Learning Journey Mindset
Many engineers enjoy the challenge associated with learning something new. This is especially true since emerging technologies can be very intriguing to professionals, particularly those who enjoy being at the forefront of their field.
By understanding that learning is a lifelong journey, you can create opportunities for your team to keep developing. Essentially, the acquisition of knowledge or the crafting of a skillset isn’t objective with an endpoint for most engineers and, by giving them a chance to keep going on their journey, you are empowering them to reach new heights of success.
- Embrace Modern Tools
Nothing is more frustrating to engineers than not having access to the right tools for their job. If your company’s current technology is behind the times, it may be making their work more cumbersome than necessary, and that can harm productivity and engagement.
By embracing relevant modern tools, you are equipping your engineers with the best you can offer. When possible, ask them what tools would make their lives easier and work to implement those solutions. This approach can be incredibly motivating, as it shows that the company is concerned about their needs and preferences.
- Give Them the Right Challenges
The chance to explore something new and stretch outside of their comfort zone is something else that can keep engineers engaged. Being given an opportunity to take part in an exciting project, even when it’s difficult, can be very motivating. Similarly, getting to step into something that is slightly unknown can be invigorating. As long as the challenge isn’t so far outside of their capabilities that they are being set up to fail, strategically handing them out can be a great way to keep your team passionate about their field.
Ultimately, all of the options above can be great for motivating your engineers. If you’d like to find out more, the professionals at Bayside Solutions can help. Contact us to discuss your questions with a member of our team today and see how our employee motivation expertise can benefit you.
