Employees Motivation

Photo courtesy of EntrepreneurOpens in new window The world around us constantly presents examples of motivation. Rocky, the prize fighter, down for the count, sees his wife through bleary eyes and rises slowly from the mat, summoning the necessary energy to attack his opponent and win. During halftime, a group of lackluster football players are transformed by the coach into screaming, aggressive, highly motivated players who go on to win the big game. Gymnasts overcome painful injuries to win medals.

How does this happen?

Many motivated employees have leaders with good leadership qualities. It is not easy to be a motivating leader, as so much of motivation is psychological by nature. Although motivation cannot be seen directly, its presence or absence can be recognized by observing employee behavior.

When a leader observes an employee doing a task, the logical assumption is that the employee is motivated. If, on the other hand, an employee is frequently observed wasting time, it can be assumed that the employee is not motivated. When organizational leaders are effective, the resulting motivated workforce is more likely to achieve organizational goals.

Leaders are the movers and shakers whose primary responsibility is to get things done through others. In order to motivate effectively, leaders must understand all aspects of the process and theories of motivation. They must readily recognize the negative consequences of unmotivated employees and how to avoid them.

What Is Motivation and Why Is It Important?

It is important for leaders and their organizations to be able to answer the question:

Motivation is a word that is tossed around a lot—motivation to lose weight, to accomplish more, and to do just about anything! But what is motivation?

Motivation is what drives people to success. Think about people who are motivated to lose weight—the more driven they are, the greater success they have. Motivation plays a critical role in employee productivity, quality, and speed of work.

Motivation is difficult to understand because a leader, for example, can’t actually see it or know it in another person; it must be inferred from one’s behavior. Nevertheless, it is imperative that a leader understand the process of motivation if they are to guide employees in accomplishing their organization’s objectives.

How motivation works is actually complex, however, at its basic people have certain needs that motivate them to perform specific behaviors for which they receive rewards that feedback and satisfy the original need. For example, a leader might wish to be promoted (need), which impels them (motivates them) to work more and longer hours (behavior), which provides them with a promotion (reward), and informs them (feedback loop) that working more and longer hours will fulfill their need for more promotional opportunities in the future.

Rewards (as well as motivation itself) are of two types—extrinsic and intrinsic. Leaders can use both to encourage better work performance.

• Extrinsic rewards: a reward given by others. Extrinsic rewards like recognition, money, or a promotion represents a “payoff” a person receives from others for performing a particular task. Motivation is driven by receiving a value reward from another person or entity.
• Intrinsic rewards: a reward given to yourself. An intrinsic reward is the satisfaction, such as a feeling of accomplishment, a person received from performing the particular task itself. An intrinsic reward is an internal reward: the payoff comes from pleasing yourself.

Everyone is motivated by a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. It is important for leaders to understand what type of reward is more valuable to their direct reports as this will help them generate higher performance.

Why Is Motivation Important?

There are several reasons why employee motivation is important. Mainly because it allows leaders to meet the organization’s goals. Without a motivated workplace, an organization could be placed in a very risky position.

Motivated employees can lead to increased productivity and allow an organization to achieve higher levels of output. Imagine having employees who are not motivated at work. They will probably use the time at their desk surfing the internet for personal pleasure or even looking for another job. This is a waste of your time and resources.

Note that this is based on one employee. Try picturing the majority of your employees doing the same thing. This is not a position a leader wants to be in.

It should be obvious that leaders want to motivate their direct reports to be more productive. But motivation also plays a role in influencing a host of outcomes, including employee engagement, organizational citizenship, absenteeism, and service quality. In order of importance, a leader wants to motivate people to:

Understanding motivation gives leaders many valuable insights into their employees to include where their motivation comes from, why it changes, what increases and decreases it, what aspects of it can and cannot be changed, and helps leaders answer the question of why some types of motivation are more beneficial than others.

It has been suggested that by understanding the reasoning behind employees’ actions, and using those results to motivate them, you can improve business performance.

In addition to being more highly engaged, motivated employees handle uncertainty more easily; are better problem-solvers; have higher levels of innovation, creativity, and customer-centricity; are more profitable; create higher levels of customer satisfaction; and increase employee retention rates.

Knowing what types of employees leaders have in their organization is important to understanding motivation as well. When it comes to engagement, a Gallup poll suggested that there are three:

As can be expected, actively disengaged employees do the most damage. As Gallup notes, “These employees are emotionally disconnected from their organizations and may actually be working against their employers’ interests; they are less productive, are more likely to steal from their organizations, negatively influence their coworkers, miss workdays, and drive customers away.”

Understanding motivation helps leaders better understand and engage their employees. Leaders can implement specific strategies to make sure that they reap the benefits of motivated employees and improve the culture of the organization, as well as the bottom line.

Benefits of Motivated Employees

Finding ways to increase motivation is crucial because it allows leaders and their direct reports to change behavior, develop competencies, be creative, set goals, grow interests, make plans, develop talents, and boost engagement.

Employee motivation is highly important for every organization due to the benefits that it brings to the company. Benefits include:

• Increased employee commitment. When employees are motivated to work, they will generally put their best effort in the tasks that are assigned to them.

• Improved employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is important for every organization because this can lead towards a positive growth for the organization.
• Ongoing employee development. Motivation can facilitate an employee reaching their personal goals, and can facilitate the self-development of an individual. Once that employee meets some initial goals, they realize the clear link between effort and results, which will further motivate them to continue at a high level.
• Improved employee efficiency. An employee’s efficiency level is not only based on their abilities or qualifications. For the organization to get the very best results, an employee needs to have a good balance between the ability to perform the task given and willingness to want to perform the task. This balance can lead to an increase of productivity and an improvement in efficiency.

Similarly, the benefits of a well-motivated workforce can provide these advantages:

• Better productivity (amount produced per employee). This can lead to lower unit costs of production and so enable an organization to sell its products as a lower price.
• Lower levels of absenteeism as the employees are content with their working lives.

• Lower levels of employee turnover (the number of employees leaving the organization). This can lead to lower training and recruitment costs.
• Improved employee relations with unions and workers.
• Contented employees give the organization a good reputation as an employer so making it easier to recruit the best workers.
• Motivated employees are likely to to improve product quality or the customer service associated with a product, for example.

High levels of employee motivation are intrinsically linked to high levels of employee engagement, which benefits employees and organizations.

It is important for leaders to understand what motivation is, its benefits and to be familiar with some of the motivation theories that can better help them understand employee’s behavior and what motivates them.