A guide to transforming employee motivation

As new generations enter the workforce and employees’ needs evolve, so must management. Have a look at this guest post by Piers Bishop from performancereviewpro.com, who will be publishing a Bookboon eBook this year.

We’re not out of the woods yet, but business conditions generally seem to be improving. Some managers are wondering if they will soon be too busy for current staff numbers – one of our clients is gearing up for a 20% expansion in personnel to cope with the expected upswing next year.  Another test of management skills in an expanding jobs market is the need to retain the key employees – the ones who are best placed to jump ship for better rewards elsewhere.

As the competition for good staff increases, some companies are starting to compete over how ‘nice’ they can be to their staff, leading to Google-type perks: Pilates classes at lunchtime, table-tennis in the conference area and time off to develop personal projects.  This isn’t entirely a good thing – employees rapidly become habituated to these benefits, so the happiness they create is temporary.

This is a normal addictive cycle and a classic example of unintended consequences, because, as with any addiction, there’s a downside – you either carry on as before but with increased baseline costs, or you chase your tail trying to ramp up the benefits faster than staff get used to them.

But there are more sustainable ways to engage your staff, that cost less and make people happier.  At Performance Review Pro our focus is on helping companies build a workforce that want to stay with you because of the innate rewards of the job – this depends on understanding how the human being works, and following through on the implications.  Companies that understand how to do this could make their trajectory out of this recession very different from the last one.

The most important thing that has changed since the ‘80s is that we now understand more about the motivation mechanisms of the human being.  For one thing, carrots and sticks are now thoroughly discredited as a motivational mechanism, except for certain kinds of mechanical tasks – Daniel Pink’s book Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us sets out all you need to know about why financial incentives don’t work very well. (Actually it’s worse than that – in most cases they make people perform worse than they would have done without them).

This is an opportunity, particularly where staff have been weaned off incentives during the recession, as the way is now open to do something more intelligent.  A scheme for motivating employees that isn’t self-defeating would be a powerful tool in the leadership and management skills toolkit.

As we know, there are some situations where people naturally give of their best. Sadly, these are mostly outside work, but even so there are some workplaces where people naturally connect with the enterprise, work well, are loyal and so on. However, there are more firms where this doesn’t happen, so we set out to build a system that can diagnose the differences between the two, and generate action plans to help managers sort out the problems and get things moving.

This involves asking the right questions to find out what is causing upset and reducing performance in the team. Much of this will be happening unseen, but still reducing intelligence, preventing proper understanding and co-operation between staff, and getting in the way of flexibility and creativity. Performance Review Pro then does the maths on the results and gives managers a dashboard of reports and action points to resolve these problems. You can use these results to build a team or personal development plan that really resonates, or feed them into everyday management conversations so they relate directly to what’s on your people’s minds.

Understanding motivation is probably the most important of all management skills – and you can try Performance Review Pro free on ten members of your team to see what a difference unlocking employee motivation makes. There’s also a set of practical resources, including a free performance review template, that you can use to make it happen.

Daniel Pink says that “Bringing our understanding of motivation into the 21st century is more than an essential move for business, it’s an affirmation of our humanity”, but whatever your reason for doing it, now’s the time – the recovery will bring many opportunities, but companies that understand how to work with the nature of their people will be the ones that profit most.

Take a look at Piers Bishop’s Bookboon eBook “Working with humans” right here.