Increase the salaries.
Or make the employees benefit from increased company profit.
Then they will have a direct incentive of being more productive and making the company more profitable. But the incentive must be high enough, not some few % of the profit margin share, otherwise it will not work. An incentive must be exactly that, an INCENTIVE. Means it must make employees actually invested and commited to be more productive.
Really, the only true reason most people work for is for the money. Nothing else.
Or, you personally improve the processes inside your company in a way that the same people with the same level of motivation will achieve a higher output.
As a company owner I woulnd’t even care about a 1% increase lol.
1% increase only makes sense if you are running Coca Cola.
If you run a small familiy business your goal should be 50%, 100%, 1,000%, 10,000% increase in profits. Otherwise why work at all?
So aim big and provide the necessary incentives to your staff, or signifincantly improve your business model and processes.
I don’t know about the type of work that needs to be done in your business, but the more expertise is required, the more you’ll have to pay your workers. There is no way around it. Or you hire more people. Or you automate tasks.
Here in Germany we have the narrative of “lack of skilled workers”, while in reality most employeers simply want to get the work of skilled people (or simply more work) for as a cheap as possible.
But people refuse to work shitty jobs and get exploited because there is a social security system in place here.
The truth is that the government plays both sides, the workers and the enterpreneurs by collecting super high taxes from both sides. Enterpreneurs then can claim that they cannot pay higher salaries to stay profitable, which is mostly a lie, and skilled workers are tricked into working for less because more than half of their salary is stolen through taxation.
What I want to say is that it is highly unlikely that you will be able to improve the productivity of your employees without a real incentive. Maybe you can just become a super charismatic leader? Or you create a super strong company vision and mission where everyone wants to support it? Both are unlikely as even guys like Elon Musk fail to properly motivate their staff with vision and charisma.
So in general, when actually working, most people will always just do the bare minimum to keep the boss happy and continue to receive their salary.
This makes sense because it is not their business and their are simply trading their time and skill for the salary.
If you want OTHER people to be more invested in YOUR business, you need to give them a higher incentive, which in most cases means more money.
Also, the more skilled and smart your employees are, the more free will they will have and less they will be influenced by fields – or in other words, you cannot trick people with free will to be more productive by using fields and without providing an actual incentive that THEY consider valueable!
The fields will not override their free will.
If they feel not valued enough, i.e. not paid enough, then no amount of fields will fix that!
Running a company means working with people and therefore you need to truly understand people if you want to scale it.
PS:
With regards to the German narrative of “lack of skilled workers”, here is a meme that describes the situation perfectly:
The text in the picture says:
“We definitely have a lack of Porsches in Germany. I am seeking one for 10k € but cannot find one.” And this is exactly the same case with the lack of skilled workers.
