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Employee Motivation
Good day everyone. How to motivate your employees? Is it only by keeping them happy? What do you think are the main elements of employee motivation?
Best Answer
Keep in mind that motivation is internal and rewards are external. Both of these are personal and very specific to the individual.
If you know how or why someone is motivated, you can craft rewards to effectively recognize their efforts and results. If you use the wrong reward, you could turn back their progress.
The simplest example is public vs. private recognition. If someone loves the spotlight and you give them a private 'good job' they will not feel appreciated and will not work as hard as they do not receive the recognition they so deeply desire. On the other side, if you have someone who fears the spotlight, dragging them up on a stage in front of the entire company could scare them so much they never perform out of fear of being put on the stage again. Transpose these two recognition strategies and you will feed their motivation. The public recognition person will work harder to be on the stage again and the other will work harder for that personalized, individual recognition from the person they admire without all the fan fare.
Ask people why they do what they do. Is it public reconition? Sense of mastery? Learning a new skill? Once you know this, you can craft the recognition strategy to feed this.
Public recognition-up on the stage they go!
Sense of mastery-they want to become the expert--subject matter expert experience
Learning a new skill--they get first dibs on new assignments that include skills they have not learned quite yet
Hope this helps. Motivation and reward are often transposed, to the detriment of the effectiveness of the individual and the team. Money is the lowest common denominator--no one will turn it down, but not everyone is driven to earn more.
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Related Activity
I think the tools used to motivate employees differ depending on which department you're working in. Many companies rely on monetary incentives to motivate their employees, but unfortunately money doesn't talk to everyone. Consider allowing employees to work from home occasionally, or, towards the end of a good quarter let people go early for the weekend.
If you don't have control over those types of incentives, consider taking an extra minute to just to genuinely thank your employees for their hard work, and offer positive reinforcement for a job well done. Employees need to feel appreciated, and they need to feel that they are having their needs met.
Good luck!