How to encourage positive attitudes and enthusiasm on your team
- Show your appreciation
- Offer specific praise
- Be generous with meaningful gifts
- Give genuinely useful items as gifts
The key to enthusiasm at work: feeling appreciated.
The basis of enthusiasm is appreciation. When team members feel like they are cared for, that their hard work matters, and that their leaders and managers are genuinely thankful for their efforts, their energy, passion, and intrinsic motivation only increase. That dynamic translates to genuine enthusiasm.
We’ve all had the experience of seeing a child light up after receiving a gift or compliment, or even of simply watching a pet respond positively to a treat or a gentle touch. We can learn from those primal responses. Specifically, team members need to be nurtured and shown gratitude: if you invest in them through meaningful appreciation, they will respond with the positivity and enthusiasm that we all want our teams.
Fuel positive attitudes through specific praise.
When trying to create a team culture of positivity, leaders and managers often make the wise choice to offer more compliments and public positive feedback. This is a sound idea, but merely making an effort to praise team members consistently isn’t necessarily enough: how you praise employees also matters.
If you want the praise and positive feedback you offer employees to drive positivity and enthusiasm in return, the key is to be specific. Instead of offering a generic “Good job!” or “Keep up the great work!” speak to inherent strengths, extra efforts, and smart tactics of the individual that contribute to team success.
Praise your team for the qualities, choices, or achievements that are unique to each of them–those kinds of compliments will fuel the positivity, confidence, and appreciation that translate into lasting, genuine enthusiasm on your team.
Increase enthusiasm in the workplace with meaningful gifts.
While words and actions are key to their enthusiasm and positivity, you can do even more to generate these qualities by offering gifts.
At Myron, we have decades of experience helping customers design and select the perfect gifts for their team members. And we know that sometimes the idea of giving gifts is met with skepticism: are gifts really the best use of budget? Will people really care about a small gift?
In our experience, gifts truly do resonate with team members. Even smaller gifts like any of our best-selling desk and office supplies or our most popular promotional pen styles can encourage individuals, provide them with small-but-critical comforts, and give a much-needed boost to the positivity and enthusiasm in any workplace.
Gifts also have the advantage of creating a sense of reciprocity within your team. When anyone is offered a gift, even a small token of appreciation like a mint in a restaurant, it activates their desire to respond in kind. When you take the first step of showing your team members you care about them through acts of generosity and gift-giving, they will naturally respond by offering extra effort and by displaying a renewed sense of enthusiasm and investment in the work.
How useful gift items can increase positivity & enthusiasm.
If you have the budget, you will also want to think beyond small or common gift items and look for opportunities to give your team members gifts that will see daily use.
When a gift is consistently, authentically useful, the team member receiving the gift feels appreciated every time they use it, especially in the case of gifts that are clearly high-quality or that the team member may perceive as expensive or luxurious. Giving unmistakably well-made gifts that are designed to be maximally useful is one of the most effective ways of increasing team members’ genuine enthusiasm at work.
The drive for genuinely useful gifts to increase motivation at work is part of why we’ve been steadily expanding our selection of high quality technology gift items like power banks and chargers and portable and Bluetooth speakers. It also explains why tech products and custom stationery are consistently amongst our best-selling products: more and more people are recognizing that genuinely useful gifts are a catalyst for positivity and enthusiasm in workplace teams.