Employee Motivation Factors Explained

Many employers believe that motivating employees means keeping their employees happy or satisfied. Not entirely true. Employee polls conducted on the topic reveal a more complex pattern.

• Motivation is primarily derived from one’s work.

• Satisfaction is derived from the environment and conditions in which one works.

Every boss who has given a raise to a disgruntled employee and later notices the employee's attitude has not changed, has learned this distinction the hard way.

Employee Motivation and Satisfaction Factors

What Can an Employer Do to Motivate Employees?

Design Jobs for Success

Designing a "Job for Success" Means:

• A qualified person can be successful, it calls upon a related pattern of skills.
• The job contributes to the larger organization goals – it matters to the whole.
• The job is measurable at some level, permitting a person to demonstrate their contribution and experience a sense of accomplishment.

For example, two jobs that each require 50% clerical and 50% sales effort might be redesigned to create one job that is 100% clerical and one that is 100% sales.  This allows better skill set matching, measurement, and sense of accomplishment by the employees doing the work.

Establish Goals

Goal setting is core to motivation.  However, goals are only as good as the corresponding measurement system.  In general, you get the behavior you measure.

If you set goals, but fail to measure them, you have not tapped the motivating power of goals.

• Establishing goals is a natural way to assist employees to stay on target without investing in a lot of management oversight.

In most jobs, the distractions are plenty (email, telephone, social exchange).  Goals help employees keep their focus.  Goals become a positive structure as employees reap the internal reward of accomplishment.

If you have challenges with finding quality employees and motivating them,
or if you need help in developing plans to
improve the efficiency and productivity of your work force,
please contact me for a free 30 minute initial consultation,
or request my free HR audit checklist
to see what areas of your organization may be ready for improvement.