Motivation in the workplace is a topic of interest to most business owners. Whether you have employees or if you are struggling with motivation yourself, understanding what motivation is can help you identify and satisfy the motivation needs of your employees.
It is a very human thing to assume that what motivates you, will motivate those around you but that is not necessarily the case.
Generally, when you talk about motivation in the workplace, you want someone (or several someones’) to perform a particular task (or tasks) well, quickly, without prompting, or you just want someone to care about what they are doing.
Before you throw money at the problem (by offering a pay rise, a bigger office or a company car for example), it often pays to try and work out what actually motivates those people.
Motivation in the workplace is different for each person.
What is Motivation in the Workplace?
Some people are motivated by ‘physical things’, whereas others are motivated by more ‘intangible things’. Unless you really understand the psyche of the person in question, it is very difficult to work out what it is that will motivate them.
And just to confuse things further, your employees may (inadvertently) lead you astray if you ask them outright what they need in terms of motivation. Not because they want to confuse you, but because very few of us understand what truly motivates us in any given situation.
We do not have a single motivation either; what motivates us to act in the workplace may be entirely different to our motivations to act at home, or when we are out with friends. And what motivates us today might not motivate us next week!
So offering a single incentive as a source of motivation might work once, maybe even twice, but it is not going to work for everyone all the time.
Examples of Typical Motivators…
Motivators might be designed as individual, team or shift rewards depending on the type of behaviour that is desired or valued by management. Primarily, motivators take the form of extra payment, acknowledgement or praise, and increased opportunities to affect how the business runs.
Physical rewards might include pay raises, performance bonuses, cash incentives (like a voucher for a retail store) for meeting targets or making useful improvement suggestions. Even providing a barbecue lunch (or breakfast) or other social events for employees to reward them for achieving goals.
Some companies use public acknowledgement or praise for a job done well, which might take the form of a name being added to a public ‘achievement board’ or being announced in a company forum or newsletter to motivate their employees.
Motivation for some employees may require little more than management actually listening to what they have to say. Those employees might also be motivated or respond more favourably to an acknowledgement of their efforts in a more private setting (i.e. one-on-one in a performance review setting, for example) rather than publicly, or by being offered more challenging tasks.
Other employees, though, might view being offered more challenging tasks as a punishment, so if you want your efforts to increase motivation in the workplace to bear fruit, you need to understand the needs of the individuals that you are attempting to motivate.