Teachers need more than a catered lunch to feel rejuvenated. Here are some approaches to truly motivate and engage your employees.
In every profession, burnout is a risk. Unlike other occupations, though, educators are particularly susceptible to disillusionment. Working in education requires long hours, extreme patience, and the ability to be thrifty with sparse resources. These skills can be easily exhausted, taking a physical and emotional toll.
Keeping educators motivated is key to helping them maintain their mission-driven passion. Here are four ways to motivate employees and help them experience fulfillment in their careers.
1. Encourage employees to take part in professional development. If anyone understands the value of lifelong learning, it’s someone who has dedicated their career to education. Encourage all employees, including administrators, to further their skills, learn about new technology or participate in workshops. Most importantly, approve requests to take time out of the typical workday setting to embark in these efforts. Make sure your employees know that management deeply cares about their professional growth.
2) Give staff the recognition they deserve. It’s always motivating to receive recognition for a job well done. Management should set goals that make recognition a priority. This could be as simple as reminding faculty and staff members of the nobility of their profession, or publicly recognizing and rewarding outstanding employees on a weekly or monthly basis with a paid meal or gift card.
3) Give teachers autonomy in the classroom. Teachers, counselors and administrators enter the field to make a difference in their students’ lives on an individual level, not follow a set of rigid guidelines. Yet, teachers of all levels are increasingly constrained by testing. Trusting teachers by giving them the autonomy to teach creatively, while still fulfilling core requirements, is essential to keeping them engaged.
4) Empower your employees by helping them recognize their strengths. To effectively achieve educational outcomes, you need to provide your faculty and staff with the resources they need to excel. To do that, it’s imperative to understand, on an individual level, how they work most effectively. Getting to know staff members this well may seem like a large task, but there are many resources that can aid these efforts, such as personality tests and evaluations like Survey Right® Employee Engagement Surveys.
To learn more about resources that can help you better motivate your employees, call us today at 877-439-9315 or contact us online to talk with one of our expert team members. We provide tools that will not only help you motivate and engage employees, but understand why they become unmotivated in the first place.