MBA1675 Q&A Wednesday: How do I motivate my employees without spending money?

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh.

Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Whether you're building a business from scratch or you're taking it to the next level, we got your back every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100 MBA and today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and a Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar MBA Net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on the show. Today's question is from Alan and Alan asks I'm on a super tight budget with my business these days but I want to reward my team. I want to motivate them. How do I do that without spending any money? Margins are razor thin so so I'm looking for any ideas to show my team I care and to make their job a little bit better without any extra expenses. Thanks so much for the help Omar. Love the podcast. I'm a huge listener. Alan. I love this question from Alan because it forces us to ask what really makes an employee's experience at Your company. Great. What motivates them? What makes them feel excited to go to work every day? Yeah, sure, people want to feel like they're compensated and they're paid fairly, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. There are many people that get paid very well and are miserable at their jobs, are unmotivated, are dissatisfied. In today's lesson, I want to share with you some of the things that I have noticed has worked in my own company when it comes to motivating your team. And all of them are absolutely free. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So, like I mentioned, Alan asks, how does he motivate his team without spending any money? He's on a tight budget. Many of us have been in this position, are in this position, will be in this position. So let's explore this. I want to start with a question. I want you to look back when you had a job, maybe, or you were working somewhere or even if you were working in your own business. I want you to look back and think about your happiest moments in a particular job or in a particular business. Those weeks, those days where you were pumped to wake up in the morning and get going, where you were excited, where you were motivated and be honest. Did any of that have to do with money? Chances are no. I could tell you from my own experience as an employee and as an entrepreneur, as an employee, as a teacher or a head of department. I remember waking up in the morning pumped to go to school, pumped to help my teachers out. I worked long hours. I was excited to impact the institution. I felt important. I felt empowered. I felt significant. I was also underpaid, but boy, was I satisfied. I was happy. When it comes to business, some of the most exciting motivating times in my entrepreneurial journey is when I was at the start of something, when I was at the beginning of building something, when I was in that dip where I'm struggling to get something done, where we had a deadline and we had a crunch and I had to pull out the best of me to make it happen. So this tells you that as human beings, we don't derive our enjoyment or satisfaction or motivation to get up and go to work solely on financial gain. There's a study that was done that Daniel Pink talks about in his book Drive, where they studied salaries and they realized that at a certain point of salary, money doesn't matter anymore. Once they know that they have a secure lifestyle, that they roof over their head, they. They could pay their expenses. What Moved the needle wasn't financial gain. It didn't matter. Even if they doubled their salary at that point, it still didn't change motivation or job satisfaction or significance. But there were three things that did matter that did make a difference, that did motivate people and made them feel like, wow, I love this job. And here are those three things. One of them was significance. Feeling like what they did every day actually mattered, that it actually made an impact on the world, made an impact on somebody. That by them showing up every day and doing the work they do every day, it helped somebody. It made somebody's life easier or more enjoyable. The second thing that made a difference was autonomy. Feeling like they had control over how they pull off what they pull off. Every day they're given a task and they feel like they have the autonomy to figure out how to do it and to actually do it the way they feel is best. That gave them tremendous satisfaction enjoying their job. And lastly, mastery. This one was really a surprising thing out of the study, where it's like, people really want to get better at something. They want to feel like a master. They want to feel like they're getting a little closer to perfection at what they do every day. And if they have a chance to feel like, hey, I'm really good. I'm getting better at something, it gives them the sense of satisfaction that they can't get by themselves. We all kind of know what we're talking about. Have you ever played team sports or you had a hobby or a craft or a musical instrument that you played in grade school or when you were younger? That feeling of getting better and better and being able to finally play that song or beat your best time on the quarter mile or get your first A on a test, that feeling never gets old. So what does this mean for our employees? Well, these are three things you can do for free to make them feel great about working at your company, to feel motivated to show up every day. The first one is significance. A lot of us forget to do this as the leaders of our business, but you have to constantly remind your team what their work every day means, what it does for other people, what whether it's your customers directly, whether it's for society as a whole, whether it's some greater goal that your company's trying to achieve. You need to make sure that you voice these things on a regular basis and you voice them to your leadership, your other managers, so they can cascade it to the team as well. But at least everybody in the company should hear these things. Once a month, at least. And then they got to hear from their peers once a week, at least. For example, at my software company, Webinar Ninja, our team is fully aware. Everybody on the team, no matter. They're in customer support, they're an engineer, they're in marketing. They're all aware of how their work impacts other people's lives. They know that webinar software is important and it's great technology. But they also know that really what they do is they empower people to be able to do what they love for a living by using webinars to grow their business, to sell their products and services, to nurture their audience, to host their coaching. And it's not just important for you to say these things to them. It's just show them. Show them what the customers say. Testimonials, customer support, feedback, customer interviews, video clips. I try to do this every time I meet with my team because it reinforces and reminds them, wow, yeah, I'm actually doing some big things here. I'm actually doing something that's important, and I'm a part of something that's doing something important, that's doing something significant. So that's the first piece. The second one is autonomy. This is something also that's free, is to give people the freedom to solve their own problems and to do the work they've been hired for. It's like what Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, said in his book Shoe Dog. Tell your team what you want and let them surprise you. Tell them what outcomes, what results you're looking for. I need this result. How they get there is up to them. And that autonomy creates a sense of ownership over the project, over what they do every day, over their job. And it makes them feel like they're trusted, that, hey, this company, you know, thinks I'm pretty good, thinks that I'm professional enough to the point where they trust me to figure it out, to pull off what they're asking for in the way I see fit, in my own style. And at the end of the day, all you care about is the result, right? It's pulling it off. Obviously, you have culture, you have company policies, all that kind of stuff that kind of keeps the boundaries. But of course, you need to give people some autonomy. And this also can apply to how they work or also when they work or where they work. Remote work is something you can definitely give people. Even if you have an office, you can offer remote work once or twice a week, where they can work from home or flexible schedules. It's Very hard for people to leave a company that gives them this kind of autonomy because they're like, I'm not sure I'm going to get this anywhere else or at this level or the way I'm used to. I've built a rapport with people. I've built a relationship with people. I like it here. They respect me, they trust me. The third piece or the third thing you can do to motivate your team without spending money is give them a way to feel like they're achieving or striving for mastery. Are your teammates doing the same thing or are they given new tasks, new challenges, new responsibilities? When you evaluate your team members, when you have one on ones, when you talk to them, you need to ask, what are you looking to do in the next two, three years so you can help them get there? If you can help them get better, every day you not only increase the value of this employee and the value they have to the company, but they also innately feel, man, this company has helped me become better. This is a place where I get better. This is not a place where I get rusty. This is a place where I feel like I'm improving and going upwards in my career and my skill sets. And this could be something very simple. It doesn't have to be like, okay, we're going to pay for your PhD. No, we're not going to spend any money, but we're going to give them new projects and new tasks and new responsibilities for them to go ahead and tackle. I'm going to give you a simple example. At Webinar Ninja, we're working on a brand new update called webinar ninja6. It's coming out very, very soon. We can't wait to release it to all our users. It has so many new features. I think the last time I counted was like over 40 new features, right? And we're in a stage called the alpha stage, where we're testing the software internally in the company, making sure it works properly before we give it to our customers. So one of the that we wanted to do to test it is to get everybody in our company to run a webinar. We called it Ninja Tactics. Basically, everybody in the company gave a webinar to the rest of the company. They did a workshop and it could be on anything. It could be. I did one on my five favorite not so popular movies. Another teammate, one of our developers, Giuseppe, who's Italian, did a cooking class on how to make great pasta. And this gave our team members a new challenge, one they're giving a presentation two they're becoming webinar hosts now and of course using the software that they love and create and support. It also gave them a chance to get to know their colleagues a little bit and learn from each other. And it just made them feel like, hey, this place does something different, allows us to do new things. It may not be something they're going to put on their CV or their resume, but it's something that is going to make them feel like I am growing.

Does it feel like it's getting really hard to figure out the best Way to save for Retirement? Fidelity can help you find clarity so you can save the best way for you. With a free personalized plan, goal tracking and timely insights, you'll be set to take on retirement your way. Get started@fidelity.com future expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account. Apply Fidelity Brokerage Services member NYSE SIPC Sniffle season happens. And when it does, your skin deserves comfort. That's why Kleenex lotion tissues are made with moisturizing Ingredients and offer 3 in 1 skin loving benefits helping protect, soothe and moisturize your skin. So whether you're at home, on the go or just living life, keep Kleenex lotion close for a little extra care that makes a big difference. For whatever happens next. Grab Kleenex.

Guys To wrap up today's Q and a Wednesday's question from Alan how do I motivate my team without spending money? Well, focus on those three areas, significance, autonomy and mastery. And all these can be done as I explained, as I shown some examples from my own company at zero cost. And here's one more thing you can do after you implement some of these exercises. Some of these things in your company survey your team members, send them a Google Doc, you know, a one minute survey and find out what they enjoyed, what they didn't. Did they find it interesting? Would they want to do it again? You'll be surprised about how they reacted to these initiatives. At the very least, it shows you care. It shows that you're trying to do something different. You're trying to shake things up and make things interesting. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 ONBA Show. If you have a question you want to ask here on Q and A Wednesday, go ahead and ask me. Just email me over@omar mba.net and I'll get your back. I'll make sure that I answer it right here on the show. Also, don't forget to share this podcast with your friends and family. Go ahead and share right now on Facebook or Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever you like. Let them know what you love about the show. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When you make these initiatives and it's your first one, it's going to feel a little bit strange because it's the first time you're doing this, you might feel like, oh, hope people receive this. Well, maybe it's corny, maybe it's, you know, a little bit different. That's okay. Your job is to do it anyway because you're trying to help. You're trying to do something good for your team. And it's always difficult to do something for the first time. So just grin and bear a little bit in the beginning and you'll thank yourself for doing it later. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.