We are in an age when employers are waking up to the fact thatpay and bonuses, while necessary, are only thebasics needed to retain your workforce.

To really inspire motivation, it is widely agreed bypsychologists and experts (not to mention popularized in numerousTEDTalks) that the best way is to give employees moreautonomy and ownership over their work, provide opportunities togrow and develop and inspire them with purpose.

This creates a much more challenging task for management. Asidefrom creating the right conditions, how can managers help inspiretheir team towards self-motivation?

Related: What drives employee engagement?

Set goals, but also milestones

Ever since Edwin Locke first revealed his 1960s research intogoal setting and motivation, it has become clear that effectivegoal setting is a key to great leadership. Even with purpose, weall need something to work towards to boost our motivation and knowwe’re making progress. Aside from making your goals smart, it’s important torecognize the value of setting milestones for each goal.

Goals should be larger benchmarks which will take time (a monthor quarter) to achieve. While having goals in place can boostmotivation, sometimes your reports can become overwhelmed if thegoal is too big. That’s where milestones come into play.

For each goal, encourage your reports to come up with thesmaller milestones that will need to be completed to reach theirgoals. This can be as simple as:

Goal: Get 100 people to participate in our quarterlywebinar

Milestone #1: Confirm speaker by...

Milestone #2: Create email list, invites and reminders by...

Milestone #3: Create banners for social media campaign by...

Breaking goals down into smaller steps will help your teammembers stay focused and give them direction if they become lost oroverwhelmed. This will also facilitate the move towards greaterautonomy.

Create regular learning opportunities

Constantly helping your employees develop is not only a priorityfor HR and managers, but also one of the main things top candidates are looking for in anemployer. However, this doesn’t have to result in expensiveexternal training.

Consider holding regular voluntary learning sessions duringwhich you share tips and tricks on how you organize yourself,balance priorities, set goals, give feedback, or any advice youthink could help your team optimize their work experience.

Open it up for your team members to also share their owninsights. Inviting inspirational speakers is great but, if you lackthe budget or space, joining conferences and meetups or evensharing powerful TEDTalks can boost motivation and creativityamongst your workforce.

It’s OK to break the bad news, but provide a solution

While you should never avoid talking when things aren’t goingwell, you should always keep up the motivation to overcome thesechallenges by leveraging your team’s strengths.

Related: There's no one-size-fits-all way to motivateemployees, research says

This shouldn’t be a generic “I believe we can do anything” talk,it should be honest. How do you do this? It’s essential thatmanagers know the strengths of each of their teammates and are ableto strategize about how each of these strengths can be put to useto overcome challenges as a team.

For example, if you’re not set to bring in your target number ofleads by the end of the month, propose a new campaign that couldutilize your PR team’s strength in event planning and your saleslead’s great oratory skills. Bonus points: Research by Gallup shows recognizing your employee’sstrengths boosts engagement and thereby also productivity,profitability and quality of work.

Allow employees to create their own purpose

Finding purpose in one’s work is one of the biggest drivers ofmotivation. If you really believe in what you’re doing and theimpact it could have on society, you’re going to have themotivation to go the extra mile.

Deloitte’s 2017 report on millennials emphasized a strongconnection between employee loyalty and purpose and asserted that,“It is well documented that businesses with a genuine sense ofpurpose tend to demonstrate stronger long-term growth, andemployees can usefully tap into this.”

For example, after experiencing a lack of development advicewhile working in the corporate sector, my manager, and one of theco-founders of our company, was motivated to create a solutionwhich would enable managers and peers to provide more frequent andreal-time performance feedback. Meanwhile, I joined the companywith an interest in how our tool could be used to create moreequitable workplaces.

Rather than encouraging me to focus only on the original purposeof our solution, my manager has encouraged my interest in thisaspect of our product by supporting my proposals for research andprojects on this topic.

While both of us are motivated by the same purpose -- providinggreater access to performance feedback and growth -- we are able tofind motivation from different angles of the same purpose. Remembera major benefit of diversity is the ability to see your solutionfrom different angles. Taking each team member’s perspective intoaccount and letting it take off has enriched our purpose andproduct.