When you are a leader of any sort, sometimes it falls on you to motivate your team. In a world where many teams are working remotely, this can be even more challenging. Sometimes, motivating your team in writing is your only option. A great tool to use is a motivation email to your team.
When leading a team, you will need to ensure that your team is aligned, or all working in the same direction and that they are as excited about that direction as you are. A motivation letter to a team can be challenging to write. We aren’t all motivating writers. It can help to have a framework and examples to use. We are going to provide you with some tips and a sample that you can use to write a rousing motivation letter to your team.
In the modern age motivation email is one of the highly used tools of communication. Team leaders often use email to communicate with the team. In addition, motivation email helps in bringing out the maximum output of the team. The right motivation can ensure that your team is productive and all working towards the same goals.
So, we definitely urge our team leaders to use the motivation email. The letter is equally important for the morale of the team as is the goal in itself. A goal doesn’t help if your team isn’t working hard to achieve it. Furthermore, some organizations use the motivation email as an integral part of communication. They integrate the motivation email as a sign of the organization’s commitment to the team. After all, if you want your team committed, you need to be committed to your team.
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How to Write a Motivation Email to Your Team?
To get started, you want to consider what the goal of your email is. What is it that you’re trying to achieve? How will you know if you have achieved that? Are you looking for better productivity? More engagement from your team? Perhaps you need your team to understand the direction of your organization.
Your team is busy, just like you. They don’t want yet one more email. Show that you are respectful of their time and that you are making the best use of it. Write a letter (which is really usually an email) that has a purpose. You might share that purpose with them.
Here are some general tips to get started:
- Never Write a Letter While You Are Angry or Frustrated – These letters should be to motivate your team. They should not be punishing or criticizing. If you are in the wrong frame of mind, they will never be motivational. Remember, if you don’t believe it then your team won’t believe it.
- Stay Positive – People like to be appreciated, respected, and heard. You want to show your team that all of these things are true. You motivate them through caring.
- If in Doubt, Be Yourself – We are not all Winston Churchill. That’s okay. Your team knows you. Be yourself, as long as while you are yourself, you can follow these other tips too. People appreciate honesty.
Starting with these in mind, write down what you are trying to achieve. This needs to be top of mind.
Write down what your team has achieved and what it is in the process of achieving. Even if you are kicking off a project or initiative, past success is a great thing to celebrate and a great jumping-off point for future success.
I remember once leading a team when the company was having financial difficulties. Budgets were being cut. My team stepped up and found ways to save. Even when meeting that goal, many of them didn’t realize the benefit to the whole company. They swelled with pride when they learned how much they had contributed to the survival and later success of the company. They owned that part and were rightly proud. It helped to tell them and show them what their effort meant.
Then, it’s worth considering what’s in it for your team. It’s wonderful when a team will rally around the organizational flag and do something because it’s what is best for the organization and sometimes that happens. Often it doesn’t or it’s only part of what motivates people. In even in a charity, people are there to help but they may have a desire to feel the warmth of doing good or feeding more people or even have a personal connection with the charity’s cause. Identify these things.
What happens if your goal is achieved and what does that mean for your team? This will often make a good segment of the letter. Done well, this can make a great closing.
Write all these things down so that they are available as you start writing. It can often help to use them to create an outline of your letter.
Start Writing the Motivation Email to Your Team
Using these points and what you wrote down, start writing your letter. There aren’t any rules for how long a team motivational letter should be, but remember that the longer it is, the fewer people will read it and the fewer people will read all of it. You may feel better writing 12,000 words as a treatise on the amazing work your team is doing but, if they stop to read a lot of treatises like that, then they won’t have time to do the amazing work.
A standard three-part format tends to work well.
- Introduction – Create a warm opening for the team. Tell them how much their work means and how proud of them you are or how proud you are to be part of them. Start on a positive note. Tease your message.
- Body (The meat of your motivational letter) – This is where you “get to the point”. Tell them what you need, what it means for them, and maybe what it means for the organization. Try to keep it to just a few paragraphs. Where possible, show them. Demonstrate what success means and show how they can be part of it.
- Conclusion – Wrap it up, repeat the goal or objective and thank them for their work.
Sometimes a good structure is the pyramid structure, especially if you have a really long message. With this structure of your motivation letter, you tell your team early on what you’re looking for and why. Then you can get into more detail. That way, if the reader is someone who just wants to get done and back to work, they get most of your message. Someone who needs more information has it available.
One motivation letter can serve your whole team this way.
Using the Motivation Letter To Your Team
For many of us, these are scary emails to write. We know someone on the team is going to make fun of them. We know that they won’t motivate everyone. Honestly, that can be true. That doesn’t mean it’s a good reason not to write one.
There is no perfect way to write these. We’ve provided a structure that you can follow and it will work much of the time. For a leader who is a strong writer, you might have your own way that is more powerful to write a motivational email to a team. That’s okay, please use it. We hope you can take away something from this anyway.
At the end of the day, know what you want to achieve and show your team that you care about them. This will resonate with most team members, sometimes even the ones that make fun of it. Just like you with your team, they want to see that you try and that you are there for them. That’s something that any good leader can do.
Other Resources
Not all of us are amazing writers and editors. Of course, you always want to use a spell checker, which comes with almost every writing-related program out there. However, there are better tools out there. Grammarly is one such tool. It provides a really robust spell checker, including finding commonly confused words (like “their”, “there”. and “they’re”.) The free version will also give you some help with basic grammar mistakes. The paid version is incredible. It does all that but will also help you with phrasing suggestions, readability, and tone. This can help keep you from writing a sterile letter that should be motivational.
Sample of Motivation Email to Your Team
Here is a sample motivational email to a team. Our goal here is to give you a starting point. Please make sure that you don’t copy this word for word. Use it as a guide with the information above to write a strong, heartfelt motivational letter to your team.
You might also want to check out a great example of a real motivational letter to a team from the new Twitter CEO.
