​While the topic of employee motivation has been spoken countless times, it is usually around the concept of staff attraction & retention, not often is it discussed how it impacts the bottom line of your business.

Leaders should be seeing Employees as Assets!

In every company, your employees are the biggest “asset” you have. They can drive innovation, productivity, and revenue, or they cannot.

I am sure you have all heard stories of, or experienced yourself, working at a great company, with great leadership, enthusiastic employees and as a result sustainable high performance. Then along comes a new CEO who steps away from focusing on the people and only on the profit. For a time the positive momentum of previous leadership continues and maybe there is an uptick in revenue or profitability. But soon the cracks begin to appear and the overall performance of the company drops.

While the new CEO probably had a mandate from the owners of the company to increase profits, with only a short-term mindset the owners of the company sacrifice long-term gains because this style of management crushes a company’s culture and can take many years to turn back around.

This is just one scenario that a company can face, but there are also others where the leadership or owners have never thought of their employees as assets and only consider them as a necessary expense listed on the P&L.

If you look at this from an employee’s perspective, would you want to work for a company like this? I am pretty sure you wouldn’t. But if you happened to be working for a company like this, would you try your best to help the company succeed? I am pretty sure you wouldn’t.

So if you flip back to being a leader of a company that didn’t prioritize their employees and treat them as a valuable assets, do you think they would work with the best interests of the company in mind? I am pretty sure you wouldn’t.

I am not going to delve into all the ways a leader can approach the motivation of their employees, just look on Google and you find a ton of these. What I would like you to think about after you read this is, “How do I think of my employees?” and if the answer is as a “necessary expense”, then you had better take a good hard look at your leadership style and start making some changes pretty quickly. Because if you don’t, there are plenty of companies out there who value their employees, likely your competition as well, that your employees will jump ship to and leave you with the employees no one else wants which will definitely impact your bottom line in the worst way possible.