Motivating Your Project Management Team

If there is one thing that all project teams experience sometimes, it is the lack of motivation. This is especially the case if project requirements have been changed, or if something else has gone wrong during the project life-cycle. As a project manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that motivation levels are high at all times. With that in mind, read on to discover some of the different approaches and techniques that you can use to motivate your project team.

Firstly, you need to lead by example. If you are not motivated yourself, how can you expect your project team to be? You need to show enthusiasm and motivation for the project. Once you do this, your motivation will become infectious and the rest of the team will start to feel more enthusiastic about their tasks. So the first key is to find ways to keep yourself motivated.

Another problem with projects is that the end goal tends to seem extremely far away. With a big project, it can feel like employees have a mountain to climb. The best thing to do to keep your team motivated, therefore, is to break up big projects into smaller amounts. This is part of the Agile Project Management methodology that is extremely popular today. By breaking up big projects into smaller and more manageable amounts, your team will feel motivated because they will be constantly achieving milestones and ticking tasks off of the to-do list. This can have a massive impact on motivation levels. After all, it is easy to feel disheartened when you feel like the end goal is miles and miles away.

In addition to this, you need to make sure that you recognize hard work. The only way you are going to be able to do this is by measuring the performance of your team. You need to know how hard your team are working and you need to praise team members when they complete tasks well or ahead of schedule. If team members feel like their hard work is not being recognized, then this is why they will feel unmotivated. After all, why would you want to put the effort in if no one was recognizing what you were doing? If you are a project manager that only gives feedback when it is negative feedback, then you need to rethink your approach. Positive feedback is just as important, if not more so.

As a project manager, one of the worst things that you can do is set your team up for failure by setting goals that are not realistic. This will lead to your team being overloaded with work and set deadlines that they know they can never complete. Not only this but while you probably over-promised in order to secure their client, they will only end up disappointed in the long run when you cannot achieve the goals that you set originally. You need to be realistic about every single project.

Another way that you can increase motivation levels is by ensuring that your team has the right tools to do their work. One of the most important things for any project team is to have the right software in place. Software is critical for communication and collaboration in any project. So now would be a good time to assess the software you have at present and to make sure that it is the right software for your team. You also need to make sure that you were using it efficiently. If your team has never been trained in the software that they are using at present, then perhaps it would be a good idea to invest in training so that they can make the most of the platform and start working smarter rather than working harder.

Another way that you can increase motivation levels among your project team is by focusing on the working environment itself. Often, it is the work environment that is stopping team members from reaching their full potential. If your office, for example, is cluttered, then this will stop people from thinking freely and creatively. By having a full office clean out and even by changing at some of the furniture and the colors that are used in the office, this can make a massive difference. It also shows employees that you care about them and their working environment and this will make them feel satisfied with their job, and it will encourage them to work hard as a consequence.

The final thing you need to do is make sure that work is scheduled appropriately. This includes delegating tasks to the right people. While it can be very tempting to simply dish out tasks based on who is available first, you need to think about people’s skill sets. By giving someone a task that is right for their skill set, they will be more encouraged to work hard on the task because they know it is something that they excel at. Not only this, but you should create a weekly schedule for your team so they know exactly what they should be doing and when. You can learn how to create the perfect work schedule for your team here. One of the problems with regards to motivation and indeed efficiency of project teams is when there is a lack of a clear schedule. This can result in two people working on the same tasks and naturally when each team member finds out that they have been doing needless work it causes them to become disheartened and frustrated.

Hopefully, you now have all of the ideas that you needed to motivate your project management team to achieve greater success in the workplace.