Understanding employee motivations can help increase productivity.

Professional consulting services help businesses on the cusp of reaching new levels of profitability, efficiency and output attain their goals. Such services also help employers better connect with employees and learn best practices for worker interaction and leadership.

One of the best ways to make sense of what drives workers is to look at things from their perspective. Some overarching career advice from Business 2 Community can help managers and owners understand the motivations of many of their workers, as well as know how they can adapt their offices to better accommodate staff. Some of the advice will apply to you and your managers as well.

Personal branding

Employers and employees should both have an idea of how they want to be viewed by others and make changes to that effect. For workers, those differences may involve extra effort in certain business behaviors and a focus on learning new skills. Reputation is a factor that can be controlled by both individuals and businesses if they put in the work.

The corollary to managing perception is that everyone needs to be honest about who they are. Making positive changes is entirely possible for employees, but they likely can’t become totally new people or go against instinct. Instead of enforcing a too-rigid corporate culture, supervisors should find out what their employees are deeply interested in and see if they can fit those passions into new work opportunities.

Management should offer to help employees who want to learn and do more and be proactive about letting their workforce know that mentoring and counseling for professional growth is available.

When companies bring in a corporate consulting service, they should involve employees as much as possible. Asking for and acting on feedback is a great potential source of growth for employees and supervisors. And when an employee is successful, management should make note of a job well done as well as subtly encourage others to offer congratulations for good work.

Employee-to-employee interaction

Workers often care the most about their relationships with colleagues, according to research by TinyPulse reported on industry website Employee​ Benefits. The happiness of staff often has more to do with co-workers and less to do with managers, especially with businesses becoming less hierarchical and more focused on collaboration.

Employers can foster positive relationships though non-traditional benefits like catering lunch or offering out-of-work activities in a low-pressure fashion to help develop those horizontal bonds between employees on the same level.