4 Tips For Staying Motivated At Work

Money is great motivation in the short term but coming in and punching the clock every day without feeling the impact or connection to your work doesn’t feel great. If you’re motivated and eager to come in to work every day, that often shines through in your performance.

It’s true that the pandemic changed everyone’s habits and it got tough. For a while, we got very used to rolling out of bed and starting work in our pajamas. But at the same time, screen fatigue is real and the human connection is missing. It was so hard to stay motivated in a sea of sameness.

As we enter a new phase where many of us are in a hybrid work environment, splitting our time between home and the office, here are some of the top tips for staying motivated.

Someone once said that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. I don’t know that I agree with that because anything worth doing isn’t always easy and can take some real effort. But passion can sustain you.

There’s something you should know about me before we go any further. I work on the Publishing House team within marketing at Rocket Central. We write informational content for brands across Rocket Companies^®.

While we don’t have specific beats, I tend to gravitate toward articles that require heavy mortgage or economics knowledge. The more technical the better. We have other people who like articles on home decor and someone who specializes in auto articles.

If someone had told me as a college freshman that I was going to get a job breaking down the extremely complex process that is getting a home loan into simple steps, I would have thought they were pulling my leg. And if they doubled down and told me I was going to rock at it and love every minute, I would likely have thought I had entered some alternate dimension. But it’s true!

I’m a writer, so my examples are based on that, but you can take these principles and apply them to any field:

Are you a problem solver? We’re always looking for people who are obsessed with finding a better way, whether that’s working on streamlining the title insurance process or creating amazing new workspaces for our team members.

If you’re a person always bubbling with ideas, you can send your process improvements and even ideas for business expansion to the Cheese Factory, our internal idea program. Companies are started here often on the back of one simple idea. Never be afraid to work at and share your passion.

Whatever you do for work, whether it’s something as solitary as writing or as people focused as client communication, it can take a lot of mental and emotional energy. It’s OK to give yourself a break every once in a while.

If you’re on site, we have meditation rooms available for our team members when they need a few minutes to clear their mind and decompress. If you’re in a situation where you’re working from home, sometimes a walk and a few deep breaths away from the screen does wonders. My team leader has been known to lighten the mood with impromptu renditions of hits spanning genres including pop, country, R&B and hip-hop.

One thing we’ve been doing as a team since we returned to work in a hybrid environment is making a point of getting together for lunch. It might be 15 or 30 minutes depending on schedules but taking the time to connect and shoot the breeze can make it that much easier to refocus later on.

There may be times when you can’t snap yourself out of a mental funk and you need to talk to someone. Mental health is incredibly important. Our team members and their dependents receive 12 free therapy sessions per calendar year through our Team Member Assistance Program (EAP).

Giving yourself space to acknowledge your needs and care for yourself can make you an even more effective team member when you get back to work.

We’ve revolutionized the mortgage industry through a completely digital mortgage experience and created the world’s first stock market for physical goods, but it’s important to realize that those weren’t the only milestones in the process. A lot of smaller things had to happen along the way in order to get there.

At Rocket Companies, we follow the OKR goal setting framework. It stands for objectives and key results. You can think of the objective as the goal you ultimately want to achieve. The key results are the different checkpoints that must be reached in order for you to achieve the goal. This is used for individual goals as well as team and company objectives.

As an example, let’s say I have a goal to create a mortgage course by the end of the year. I might break that up by saying I’m going to have a complete outline by the end of the first quarter, write it in the second quarter, and make sure there’s development and beta testing in the third quarter in time to launch in the latter part of the year.

Within that, you can also break it down further. I could say I’m going to write everything on preapproval and credit in April while going on to making an offer and locking your rate in May. The breakdown lets you see measurable progress and keeps you motivated as you go along.

We’re given everything we need to succeed here. We have laptops with docking stations and big, beautiful monitors. However, it doesn’t matter how great your desk is. Working in one space sometimes inhibits creativity and problem solving. Occasionally, you need different stimulus to get the mind going.

Over the past several years, our workspaces have undergone a major redesign. We have new spaces for collaboration and areas where you can work in solitude to get stuff done. Each workspace has also been configured with a hybrid work environment in mind, so you can start a videoconference whenever necessary with a couple taps of a button.

If you’re at home, sometimes a change of scenery is all it takes. Work from the patio or go from the couch to the kitchen table. Light an aromatherapy candle.

Everyone is different. For me, it’s not so much about getting into a physical space as a headspace. I must be listening to music when I write, usually punk rock. Most of the other writers I know also listen to music, but I’m unusual in that I want the lyrics. The point is, you need to find what works for you and keeps you going.

Everyone loses motivation occasionally. There’s typically a project or two you’re not sure you’ll see the results from. But if you’re consistent in your approach, give yourself a break and follow these tips, the occasional blip doesn’t have to turn into a day of static hoping against hope to get your brain tuned to the right frequency.