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Mar
26
2019
OWNERSHIP

The 5 Best Ways to Motivate Your Employees

The 5 Best Ways to Motivate Your Employees

Read our blog post to learn how to retain employees by keeping them motivated.

With unemployment rates hovering at 4 percent or lower throughout much of 2018, it’s been difficult for employers to hire and retain good workers for hourly positions. The abundance of available hourly positions makes it easy for employees, especially younger ones, to hop from job to job. This is especially troublesome for franchise owners who often rely on younger hourly workers to staff their businesses and provide exceptional customer service.

For franchise owners, constantly having to hire and train new employees takes time away from running and improving your business, which makes employee retention paramount to your success. But retaining younger employees like Millennials and Gen Z-ers may require a different approach than older employees. As a franchise owner, providing them the right support and encouragement can be key to keeping them around. With that in mind, here are five low-cost (or no-cost) tips to help franchise business owners motivate and retain employees.

Start by Hiring the Right People

One of the best ways to keep employees happy is to hire people who are a good fit for your business. Hiring out of desperation only leads to employees who are more likely to leave as soon as they find a better opportunity (and probably won’t help drive your business forward while they’re employed).

As you search for your ideal employees, look for people whose values, views and behaviors align with your own and those of your business. An employee who embraces the ideals of your business is more likely to show up to work already motivated to help your business grow and stay around longer. To help you find the right employees to hire, here’s a helpful resource with 10 questions to ask during the hiring process.

Provide a path forward

Millennials and Gen Z-ers get a bad rap for being entitled and lazy, but they’re a lot more complicated than that. Younger employees today aren’t necessarily entitled, they just typically have higher expectations and standards. To keep these employees motivated, you need to provide them a growth plan. This doesn’t mean you have to set forward a path for them to take over the business on day one, there are a lot of ways to motivate your employees with incremental growth during their tenure:

  • Ongoing training: By consistently training employees how to complete additional tasks, you keep them engaged in the business. Ongoing training also helps you fill gaps when the time comes for other employees to move on.
  • Learning new positions: Same with ongoing training, cross-training employees in other positions is a great way to keep them motivated by allowing them to learn new skills. For example, if you own a franchise restaurant, don’t just stick talented employees behind the grill; teach them how to run the register, manage inventory or put together orders.
  • Training others: After your employees master their normal job responsibilities, provide them a sense of ownership by allowing them to start training new employees on the position. You can even implement a certified trainer program to encourage ambitious employees to learn the skills they need to train others.

Promote Growth Across the Business

To keep your employees passionate about your business’ potential, it’s helpful to set the example as a franchise owner. To do this, constantly look for opportunities to improve and grow your business by leveraging the latest technologies and systems from the brand. This dedication to progress will likely resonate with your hourly employees and give them the feeling they’re all working towards something bigger.

Here’s an example of this in action: recently, The UPS Store introduced 3-D printing for its franchise owners to offer. By embracing this new technology, their franchise owners can accomplish a couple of things when it comes to keeping employees motivated:

  • Providing a new and exciting tech solution for hourly employees to learn how to use.
  • Showing you’re committed to growing the business by expanding your services to include the latest technologies.

Allow Employees to Do What They Do Best

Younger employees grew up with the internet so they’re typically very savvy when it comes to digital channels. If you don’t have a lot of experience with social media (or a lot of time to manage it), allow your younger employees to take the lead in helping you build a stronger online presence for your location.

Make sure to give them the tools and guidelines they need to represent your business on social media the right way. Here are some of the resources you should provide your employees when you entrust them with your social media presence:

  • Access to the brand guidelines so they can create brand-compliant, on-message social posts.
  • A clear set of rules for social media posts – what not to say, how to use images, etc.
  • Scheduling tools to manage social media posts so your employees can spend less time manually posting content and more time on their day job.

Reward Good Work

Younger employees often need more feedback than members of older generations. For Millennials and Gen Z-ers, no news is often bad news. As a franchise owner, make sure to reward employees who are working hard to make your business better, while also providing additional support and encouragement for struggling employees.

This doesn’t mean you have to constantly hold employees’ hands or dish out a steady stream of bonuses. In fact, there are plenty of low-cost ways you can reward your employees and keep them motivated:

  • Recognizing a job well done: When an employee goes above and beyond, make sure to share their success with your other employees. This gives the employee a sense of accomplishment while motivating other employees to do the same. 
  • Offering team incentives: Whether it’s hitting sales goals or earning customer praise, reward your team for major accomplishments. This could be simple rewards like giving out gift cards, bringing in food or throwing an employee party.
  • Implementing a recognition program: Offer employees a way to congratulate each other with a program for them to recognize co-workers. Whether it’s as simple as Post-it Notes on a billboard in the break room or an online system, these programs are a great way to give employees a sense of pride in their work.
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We Proudly Support Our Veterans

Participating partners with the VetFran program, The UPS Store offers qualifying veterans $15,000 off their franchise fee to start their new business. To learn more, contact The UPS Store Franchise Development Team.

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Ranked for over 30 Consecutive Years

The UPS Store has been ranked #1 in the postal and business services category for over 30 years and remains in the top 5 overall for the seventh consecutive year according to the Franchise 500 list.

Kristin Howard

Franchisee, Michigan

The reason my husband and I decided to go into franchising and specifically with The UPS Store, is the different opportunities we're given with the business. The UPS Store has name recognition as well as opportunities to expand.

Debbie Adams

Franchisee, Kentucky

What I enjoy most about being a The UPS Store owner is working with my customers. We are the solution specialists for our customers.

Jim George

Franchisee, Illinios

My favorite part about The UPS Store network is the camaraderie with other franchisees. Everybody loves to help everybody else. You’re really part of a family.

Greg Murray

Franchisee, Florida

The interesting thing about The UPS Store is that when a customer walks through the door there's an extremely high probability that they're coming there to do something that is important to them. So at the end of the day, what we do for customers is very important and they are trusting that we are going to do it well.

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Mariana Huberman

Franchisee, Washington, D.C.

One of the things that I love about The UPS Store franchise system is that you're not ever in this by yourself. The franchisees of The UPS Store network are great.

Heidi Morris

Franchisee, Colorado

The thing I enjoy most about being a The UPS Store franchisee is I get to get up, go to work and know that I'm helping other business owners succeed in what they're doing.

Bob Brown

Franchisee, Tennessee

Owning a The UPS Store franchise has changed my life because it's finally given me the opportunity to engage my customers and my staff and be able to take real pride in what I do. As a franchisee, we get faced with solving peoples' problems every day and we do everything we possibly can to try to help.

Marie Jensen

Franchisee, Oregon

My favorite thing about The UPS Store is the variety. I love the variety of customers, I love the variety of services; getting to know the customers, meeting their needs, finding out how we can help them accomplish what they need to accomplish and seeing how happy they are. That makes me ecstatic.

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Tad Mollnhauer

Franchisee, Florida

With the products and services that The UPS Store provides we can make a difference in people's lives and that is the best reason for being a The UPS Store owner.

Joy Batchelor

Franchisee, Idaho

What makes being a The UPS Store franchisee worthwhile at the end of the day is the customers. The customers treat us like we're family.

Paul Erchinger

Franchisee, Texas

One nice benefit of owning a The UPS Store franchise for me has been that it gives me the opportunity to be more involved in the community. As I make relationships with others it seems like no matter what the environment is, in one way or another business comes out of that and that's not my objective—it's been a secondary benefit to being involved in the community.

Chris Reminder

Franchisee, Ohio

There are several things that I really enjoy about being a The UPS Store franchisee. First and foremost it allows me to get to know the people in the local community and that is a lot of fun. We get to see people on a regular basis. We get to know their life stories. That's a lot of fun.

Bruce Jones

Franchisee, Kentucky

Since we have joined The UPS Store, our life has changed by just having more time to spend together as a family. We've been very fortunate with the stores that we have and we have a great staff that looks out for our best interest and we look out for theirs.

Lonnie Williams

Franchisee, Oklahoma

What makes The UPS Store so successful is it gives each individual an opportunity to grow with the network and just meet the challenges that are brought to them on a daily basis. Every day gives us a new opportunity to help another person, to help another small business, to answer a question and to solve a problem.

Jeff Graham

Franchisee, Alabama

I love my customers. I love my employees. I love every person, every face that comes into my store. I enjoy every day going into work and I can't see doing anything else for the rest of my life.

Stacie Stigar

Franchisee, Alaska

I think that this franchise is so successful because of all of the resources that are available to us as center owners—we have marketing materials, we have so many different opportunities for help from the home office, and it just really makes for a great franchise.

Don Pollard

Franchisee, New Jersey

I think the thing that makes this franchise successful is a number of things. First of all we have an outstanding system, we have a great product, a great brand, and we're able to attract dynamic people to run these centers and run the business. So I think when you put all that together it really provides for a winning combination.

Mary Ellen Nichols

Franchisee, Tennessee

The thing I love about the franchise is that you have the UPS name backing you but yet you also have the autonomy to make your own decisions to promote.

Laura Griffin

Franchisee, Florida

In the eight short months I've owned my The UPS Store it has really changed my life. I've gone from being an employee of someone else to being an employer of my associates. It's a big responsibility but it's exciting every day.

Sandy Scandrett

Franchisee, Wisconsin

Being a The UPS Store franchisee has improved every aspect of my life. It's very rewarding financially, professionally, and emotionally. I have a large number of regular customers who are really, really appreciative of everything we do.

Kristie Robison

Franchisee, Alabama

I would say owning a The UPS Store location has changed my life to where I have more time and flexibility. In owning your own business you get your store up and running and you get employees that you can trust that are going to help keep your store running. This allows me to attend my two boys' ball games and also travel and do things with them so it has really changed my life for the better.