Here’s a question: what motivated you to read this article about boosting teacher motivation? Perhaps you see teachers physically showing up to meetings, but you can sense that they are not emotionally “present”. Or perhaps you can tell that staff are lacking their usual energy and have struggled to regain their teaching “mojo” since schools reopened fully.

If either of these scenarios sounds familiar, let me tell you that you’re not alone. Similar trends are showing up in virtually every organisation as we emerge from the pandemic - both within and outside education.

Following a steady rise over the past decade, employee engagement across all fields has decreased globally by 2 percentage points, from 22 per cent in 2019 to 20 per cent in 2020, according to the analytics company Gallup.

And if teachers are currently lacking in motivation, who can blame them? The past two years have been a challenge: indeed, a recent poll by Teacher Tapp shows that nearly three-quarters of headteachers have seen a colleague cry since the start of the new academic year.

But teacher motivation is important. A University of Munich research paper (Frenzel, Goetz, Lüdtke and Pekrun, 2009) says that there is a correlation between teachers enjoying teaching and how much their students enjoy lessons. In other words, motivation can be catching. So, if you want students to be motivated to learn, then you need enthusiastic teachers.

Of course, school leaders can’t simply eliminate the ongoing stress caused by the pandemic, but there are ways to boost staff motivation even within this context.

Here are five helpful questions to ask yourself when thinking about how to motivate your team.

1. Are you relying on motivational ‘hygiene factors’?

Remember that accountability mechanisms such as Ofsted ratings and league table positions are important, but they are ultimately what motivation thinking calls “hygiene” factors; they’re not what we would consider “deep motivators”.

However, the challenge is that it can be easy to forget this given the fast-paced and compliance-driven culture that most schools have to operate in. When I spoke to headteachers for my book Intrinsic: a manifesto to reignite our inner drive, this was a common theme.

Let’s accept Ofsted ratings and league table positions as necessary hoops that we have to jump through, but let’s remember that they should not be used to try to deeply motivate our staff - or, for that matter, ourselves. We need to instead tap into what really matters to teachers.

2. Does your school have a clear sense of purpose?

My work on motivation shows that purpose is the most effective and sustainable motivator of all. I define purpose simply as: “How does your work help and serve others?”

Teaching and school leadership - and the support they offer to young people, and to wider communities - are inherently purposeful. But it’s easy to lose this sense of purpose given the myriad day-to-day pressures that teachers are under.

This is where the pandemic may have provided the means for us to reconnect to our deeper purpose. For instance, one school leader told me how sending food parcels to disadvantaged families during the pandemic reminded her of her purpose - and the critical role she played.

School leaders need to keep reminding their staff of moments like these. They should aim to go beyond a bland or general “mission statement” and instead develop a purpose statement that is unique to the context of your school and the community that it serves.

3. Does every member of your team have a personal mission statement?

We usually feel most motivated when our sense of individual purpose is linked closely to that of our school.

Alongside the purpose statement you create for your school, encourage each member of your team to develop a personal mission statement. For example, instead of saying “I’m in charge of key stage 2”, a teacher might express their personal mission statement as, “I help my key stage 2 pupils to re-engage in learning after the pandemic, by rebuilding strong human relationships and role-modelling deep engagement myself.”

4. Do you provide your team with enough autonomy?

The professional autonomy of teachers and school leaders - the sense of being in control of our professional destiny - has been heavily undermined in recent years.

Often teachers tell me that they don’t feel they can teach in the way they want to. Or they feel that they are getting distracted by things they shouldn’t really be spending time on. For example, many teachers I interviewed for my book reported that they were spending hours each week entering pupil data into spreadsheets.

This matters because a sense of diminishing autonomy can be disastrous for motivation.

The good news is that we often have more autonomy than we think - and leaders need to find ways to emphasise this for staff.

For instance, while the national curriculum somewhat constrains what we teach, it allows for flexibility in how we teach. Leaders should encourage staff to explore that flexibility and not place unnecessary restrictions on them in terms of teaching methods.

Finding ways to streamline admin tasks can help here, too, such as using apps to speed up data entry.

5. Is your team developing mastery?

We talk a lot about helping students to reach mastery in their school subjects, but striving for mastery can also be deeply motivating for teachers.

Teaching is a complex profession; it’s impossible to reduce it down to simple routines or prescribed practices.

We are learning that mastery in teaching goes well beyond the technical aspects of subject knowledge and pedagogy.

Relationships and role modelling are key. Broader human skills like communication, influencing and relationship-building are as important as the technical ones, and we can keep getting better at these even if we feel we know our subjects and pedagogy back to front.

If your staff can focus on building mastery in these skills, they will have a sense that they are on their way to becoming the best versions of their professional selves - and that, in itself, can be deeply motivating.

Sharath Jeevan is the founder of Intrinsic Labs and author of Intrinsic: a manifesto to reignite our inner drive

This article originally appeared in the 12 November 2021 issue under the headline “How to keep your teachers motivated during Covid”