What is the key to making an employee stop at nothing to get a job done? What makes a worker go beyond the employer’s expectations? What is the motivation for a star performer? What is it that makes an employee brave all the odds to achieve set target? Is it more money, the environment, position or other considerations?
As employers and leaders are interested in unraveling this puzzle, so are researchers.
Fallacy of money power
The general belief is that the rationale behind work is to earn money. Corroborating this, Frederick Taylor, one of the earliest researchers on the power of money on employees, in 1911, described money as the most important factor in motivating the industrial workers to achieve greater productivity. But later studies found out that the motivational influence of money is transient. At a certain point, money is no longer a motivation for work. That was the finding of a study carried out in 2010 among workers in the United States of America by Timothy A. Judge, Ronald F. Piccolo, Nathan P. Podsakoff, John C. Shaw and Bruce L. Rich.
The study, entitled The Relationship Between Pay and Job Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis of the Literature, reviewed 120 years of research and synthesized the findings from 92 quantitative studies, while studying over 15,000 individuals and 115 correlation coefficients.
The study found that there was no strong correlation between money and job satisfaction or level of performance. The researchers found that the correlation was .14, which meant that there was less than 2 per cent overlap between pay and job satisfaction levels.
The researchers went a step further to carry out group level comparison, reporting that “Employees earning salaries in the top half of our data range reported similar levels of job satisfaction to those employees earning salaries in the bottom-half of our data range.” The import of the study, which has been subjected to cross-cultural comparison, is that money is not a major source of motivation for most workers. While money may motivate shop floor staff, its influence wanes as employees move up the ladder.
Failure of fringe benefits
A number of organisations have tried to motivate their employees by giving them fringe benefits. Provision of staff bus, medical allowance, free or subsidized lunch, education allowance, Christmas bonus etc cannot keep the verve in staff for long because after a while they lose their motivational bite as employees fail to see them as benefits but rather as rights. A company that started a welfare scheme for members of staff will have a lot of explanation to do if all of a sudden it expresses the intention to stop it because staff members will have come to view the scheme as a right, not a reward for exceptional accomplishments.
Challenging and friendly atmosphere
All employees love to work in a friendly atmosphere; a place where they can be themselves, where the boss is not unnecessarily difficult, where colleagues show understanding and the system is fair. Workers always look forward to such places because they spend a good part of their lives at the workplace. So, if they do not feel happy about where they work and the people they work with, it will have a telling effect on their performance.
In the same vein, most workers love challenging environments, a place that can task their creativity, stretch their imagination and challenge their ability, a place where their best can come into manifestation.
However, after working in an environment for a while, all of these no longer matter because they are taken as normal. Instead of serving as motivation for top performance, they may at a point become a bore and turn out to be a disincentive because the human nature is always yearning for something new. Therefore, the onus is always on employers to see to it that new things are always introduced in the work place to avoid creating a humdrum which can be a drawback on performance.
Promotion
Moving staff to the next level is seen a boon by many of them. It keeps them happy, motivated and loyal. It is seen as a recognition of their worth and contribution by the organization. Many workers appreciate promotion not just because of the additional money that comes with it but especially because it offers them an opportunity to do more for their organizations.
But promotion can never go round even among outstanding staff members. If there are four exceptional employees and there is a vacancy, it is a given that only one of them can get it. So, what happens to the rest? How will they be motivated to continue the work at their former pace? Then, the fact that an employee gains promotion at a point in his career does not mean that he will always be promoted because promotion is not just a function of performance; rather it is a product of a number of factors including a company’s policies, organizational chart and wages, among others.
In addition to that, there is the Peter’s Principle, which states that every employee rises to his level of incompetence. So, after promoting a staff up to a point how will the employer let him know that he is unsuitable for further promotion? How will the loyalty of such staff be assured after confronting him with such fact?
How to consistently motivate employees
Leaders often fail to motivate their staff on a sustainable scale because they lump everyone together. No two persons are the same, so needs vary among employees. What motivates a staff member may not of necessity be a fillip to another. Therefore, to effectively motivate staff so as to bring the best out of them, leaders must know each of them personally and find out what it is that matters more than any other thing to each of them. Motivation has to be employee-specific to be effective.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
According to Abraham Maslow, human needs are categorized as physiological, safety, social, esteem and self-actualization. Of all these, the highest is self-actualization. This, according to him, is the highest aspiration of an individual. What managers and leaders are supposed to do is to help everyone who works or relate with them to accomplish this. They can only do this if at the outset they come to the understanding of what the highest aspiration of a staff member is.
Three categories of staff
By taking time to understand what self-actualization means to every staff member, a leader will find out that there are three categories of employees. First is the category of staff whose self-actualization aligns with the company’s goals and visions. These are the employees who come to the organization with a view to building a career in it. They are in it for the long haul. So, they are not discomfited by temporary discomfort. They always see a silver lining in the company’s cloudy sky. They are not interested in jumping ship because they believe in the organization. Staff members in this category are self motivated. They do not wait for any prodding; they flow naturally with the company’s tide. Belonging to the organization is enough stimulus for them. Staff in this category go the extra mile to ensure that things run smoothly in the organization.
Since these employees are already motivated, the leader has no problem raising their level of motivation.
The second category of staff is those whose aspirations are completely at variance with the goals and visions of the organization. They are in the organization because that is all they can get at the moment. Employees in this category are the first to complain when things go awry. Since they do not share the vision of the company, they are usually unwilling to make any sacrifice. They are always looking outside the organization for openings and they step out at the earliest opportunity.
Such employees are usually the ones who cause disaffection in the organization; they spin rumours and spread tales. They are quick to pick holes in the position of the company and are the loudest complainants. They know that they have no strong attachment with the organization so they are not bothered whether it stays afloat or goes under. Such employees are toxic; they constitute a deadweight to the organization.
Motivating employees in this category is a Herculean task.
The third category of employees is made up of those without clear-cut aspirations. Because they are undecided, they are unstable. They do not know whether to stay in the organization or quit; they blow hot and cold all the time until they are able to decide what their aspiration is. This eventually determines how they conduct themselves.
To carry out a good work of motivation on this category of workers, the leader must first help them to find out where they belong.
Dealing with different categories of staff
Since staff members fall into different categories, the same strategy cannot be deployed to motivate them.
Self-motivated employees
For employees whose self-actualization aligns with the company’s goals and visions, the leader must motivate them by creating opportunities for them to realize their goals through various means.
First, the leader must provide a platform for them to be trained. This is important not just for the employees but for the organization as well because if the employees are properly trained, they will be able to achieve their career goals and as a result contribute to the actualization of corporate goals.
Then the leader must also provide mentoring for them. Staff in this category must be attached to managers who will be able to groom them for greater responsibilities in the organization.
The leader must also, on a consistent basis, share with these employees the short, medium and long term goals of the organization. This is critical because this category of staff must always be made to see where the organization is headed since they have been able to establish a nexus between the organization’s success and theirs.
Toxic employees
For employees whose aspiration is at variance with the organization’s vision, any attempt at motivating them is a waste of resources because their heart is elsewhere. Rather than squandering resources on trying to get them to buy into the vision, the leader will do well to ease them out of the system as soon as possible. Many leaders are optimistic; they believe the best in their subordinates and hope that they will get better. But a leader must know when to throw out of his ship a deadweight so as to save the ship from going under. The longer such people are accommodated in the system the more difficult it becomes to ship them out because of sentiments. Once they are identified, the leader should not waste his time trying to make a corpse walk.
Undecided employees
Dealing with people who are not sure of their aspirations requires tact. The leader must help them to decide one way or the other by exposing them to training opportunities and giving them tasks that will require their commitment. Such tasks will provide the leader the opportunity to assess them and be able to know whether they belong in the organization or not.
Avoiding wrong employees trap
The best thing for a leader is to not allow into the system those whose aspirations are not in tandem with the corporate vision. Instead of allowing such to get into the system and spread toxin, it is best to bar them from gaining access.
To achieve this, the leader must ensure that apart from having recruitment agencies or the human resources department do the preliminary work of interviewing and selecting candidates, he must have a session with every intending employee so as to have an understanding of his perspective and what drives him. Doing this will save the organization a lot of man-hours that would later be expended on employees who are with the organization physically but have their minds elsewhere.
This is one of the secrets of the success of Richard Branson, Virgin Group chairman. There is nobody of significance who gets employed in Virgin Group in any part of the world who is not screened by Branson. With that, he has been able to, considerably, keep those with a different orientation away from his organization. Similarly, Dr Mike Adenuga Jr, Chairman of Globacom, always insists on having an interface with anyone who is joining his organization. This enables him to know a few things about the individual and he is able to decide right from the onset whether he wants the candidate in or not.
When an experienced leader has a session with an intending employee, he is able to tell whether the person is real or merely putting up an act. Experienced leaders have a gut feeling as to the authenticity of the candidate. Gut feeling, as explained by Jack Welch, former Chairman of General Electric, is nothing but pattern recognition. Experienced leaders have interacted with so many intending employees that they know from a mile away those who are the same as the personality described in their curriculum vitae and those who are merely masquerading.
Last line
Getting the employees matrix right is the first step to building a great company.
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