Motivating your staff

“Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. And that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.”
Dale Carnegie – Author, lecturer, salesman, public and motivational speaker

Increasing productivity, better retention rates, increased morale, personal responsibility, goal achievement, new ideas and initiatives, skill development, reduced absenteeism and tardiness. Motivating staff is at the heart of all these benefits the business will receive from a motivated, focused, well lead team. It is a core responsibility as a leader and manager to motivate your workforce - to get the best out of them. It is unacceptable to assume and expect employees to be completely autonomous and that they will (of their own initiative) drive themselves and your business forward.

“Management is nothing more than motivating other people.”
Lee Iacocca – former CEO of Chrysler (and turnaround specialist)

First, some key points to establish a foundation for motivating staff. Based upon psychologists accepted principles of human needs, the work environment must be “relatively” clean and tidy, providing basic necessities of food and beverages (and a separate place to consume them – not at their work station). Their employment status must be secure (no threats of redundancy, etc) and more importantly viewed by themselves as being secure. There must also be a fairly socially interactive environment – good communication channels and interaction with workers and others.

In real terms humans have to feel safe, respected and valued before they will perform at their best. It’s pretty hard to be motivated (by oneself or someone else) if where you work is continually dirty or messy (including the toilet!), you can’t get a drink and you’re constantly being threatened that if you don’t “buck up your ideas,” you’re out!

Once these basic criteria are established, then and only then will you be able to introduce any form of motivational tactics to encourage and develop your staff.

“Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed.”
Brian Tracey – Sales guru and trainer

There has been a fair amount of research conducted as to what are the motivators for staff. There is a significant difference between factors that are present that just add to job satisfaction and are not truly motivational, and ones that actually will assist in motivation. The primary factors* that increase job satisfaction (or conversely by their absence or poor quality cause job dissatisfaction) are:

• company policy (or lack of)
• supervision
• interpersonal relationships
• working conditions (hours, facilities, equipment, technology)
• and salary and benefits (how many employees stay just for the money or extra company perk?)
  

The main factors motivating employees are achievement (meeting and exceeding goals), recognition (public acknowledgement of a job well done), work itself (employees believing that their role is an integral part of the business), responsibility and advancement. Clearly there are many factors here that require no cost at all to the business, to initiate and continue to develop a motivated workforce. It’s not hard to reward and recognise extra effort, to praise individual achievements, to empower staff with tasks and areas of business management and to set goals and targets for staff to achieve and promote them accordingly.

The first thing you have to do is get to know your staff, have one on one meetings. Conduct performance appraisals, set agreed goals and targets and rewards and motivations that work for and will encourage them. Other key influences that help determine workplace motivation are leadership abilities and planning – do all the staff know where the business is going and what they’re doing to help it get there? If you don’t know, then they surely won’t and are just completing tasks and basic functions, because that’s what they’re supposed to do.

“Even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15% of one's financial success is due to one's technical knowledge and about 85% is due to skill in human engineering, to personality and the ability to lead people.”
Dale Carnegie

Provide clear vision and a plan of how to realise it, provide the goal, the path, and thus the motivation for all. It then yields a happy, productive work environment where staff are motivated and want to work and stay working for you.

Your level of success is only limited by yourself.

Best wishes,  

Vaughan