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How to keep junior staff members motivated

Author: ICAEW

Published: 01 Jul 2022

Learn how to keep junior staff members motivated in your company by putting these employee motivation tips into practice.

Motivating and engaging with your junior staff members in your business is an important part of creating and developing highly motivated employees. You want to make sure that your business doesn’t have a high turnover rate, which can affect employee motivation.

As a business owner, it’s crucial that you keep your junior staff members motivated. You need to make sure that you leave a lasting first impression on your employees so that the employee experience is positive. By taking this into account, your junior employees will work hard to deliver long-term success and results.

If you have hired junior staff members for the first time, you need to be aware of your responsibilities as an employer. By taking this into account, it’ll make your junior employees highly motivated to deliver long-term success for your business.

Our latest blog looks into how to keep junior staff members motivated in your company. From employee motivation to creating a positive working environment, it’ll help ensure that your junior employees are motivated and engaged.

Why is employee motivation important for junior staff members?

Employee motivation is important for junior staff members as it’s an essential component of a successful company. If your employees feel that the work they’re doing is meaningful and benefiting clients and customers, it’ll increase satisfaction and engagement. It means that junior staff members are able to do a good job when they’re at work.

Companies that don’t prioritise employee motivation are likely to experience reduced productivity and low output. If this is the first time you’ve worked with junior staff, it can be difficult to know how to interact with them and maintain their motivation levels while at work.

While there are plenty of ways to keep junior staff members motivated, we’ve listed a few ideas that can help keep them engaged. By putting this into practice, it’ll help improve employee engagement, thus enabling them to perform at a high level.

Allow employees to work on their own

While it’s great that you want to monitor your junior employee’s progress, you need to also let them work on their own as soon as they are ready. It’s the sort of responsibility that junior staff members should be able to handle from the get-go when starting a new position.

It’s important that you should provide regular progress updates as well as detailed feedback on the junior staff member’s work. By checking in on them to see how they’re getting on, it means that you have a good idea of how they’re managing their workload.

As an employer, you want to make sure that the junior employee is settling in well into their new position. That’s why it’s key that you don’t micromanage them so that they can get on with completing the tasks they have to do on their to-do list or project management tool.

Create a positive working environment

Having a positive working environment is essential when keeping junior staff members motivated. Bad management is one of many reasons that employees may leave your company, thus increasing the employee turnover rate. There’s a lot that you can do to help junior employees while - creating a positive work environment is a good place to start.

If the business finds itself in a difficult situation, it's crucial that you are able to put a positive spin on it. By providing good news and ‘looking on the bright side’, you can hold the attention of your employee, thus encouraging and motivating them to work towards addressing the issue.

It’s important that you are open and receptive to feedback from your junior staff. By listening to them, it’ll encourage other people to make suggestions on how to improve certain aspects of the working environment within your company.

Encourage them to share ideas with fellow team members

Junior staff members who come into a new field will be inexperienced in the industry they’re working in. You need to make sure that you encourage them to share ideas within the company’s workplace so that they feel that their ideas and input are valued within the business.

If a junior staff member has some ideas of how to improve customer satisfaction, then that could benefit your company in the long run. You need to make sure that you listen to their ideas and provide advice to them if they need refining. It’s crucial that you make the time to guide the junior employee on their ideas and steer them in the right direction.

While you don’t need to take their ideas onboard, by listening to them, it means that the employee feels like they’re a valued member of the company.

Give them room to develop and grow

When it comes to developing junior staff members, you need to give them room to develop and grow. By providing opportunities for junior employees to grow, it’ll make them highly motivated to advance their career into more senior positions.

It can be easy for your company to get complacent when it comes to giving recognition to employees who are doing great work. That’s why it’s key to give credit to junior staff members, which not only builds their confidence, but also creates a culture where employees can support one another.

Having a well-thought out training and progression plan is essential to ensuring that the junior staff member stays at your company for years to come. By providing them opportunities to attend seminars, training workshops and conferences, it can help them acquire new skills that they can apply to their current job.

Once the junior employee has been in the job for a considerable period of time, you can consider giving them more responsibility. One example could be giving them a project to lead while coaching the junior staff member throughout the duration of the project.

Conclusion

Keeping junior staff members motivated is an important part of ensuring that they feel part of your company from the very first day in their new position. It’s important that your company has inclusive recruitment practices in place so that your company attracts diverse employees who want to work for you.

By putting these tips into practice, it’ll help keep junior staff members motivated in your company, thus improving employee motivation.