Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money

1. Be generous with praise. Everyone wants it and it’s one of the easiest things to give. Plus, praise from the CEO goes a lot farther than you might think. Praise every improvement that you see your team members make. Once you’re comfortable delivering praise one-on-one to an employee, try praising them in front of others.

2. Get rid of the managers. Projects without project managers? That doesn’t seem right! Try it. Removing the project lead or supervisor and empowering your staff to work together as a team rather then everyone reporting to one individual can do wonders. Think about it. What’s worse than letting your supervisor down? Letting your team down! Allowing people to work together as a team, on an equal level with their co-workers, will often produce better projects faster. People will come in early, stay late, and devote more of their energy to solving problems.

3. Make your ideas theirs. People hate being told what to do. Instead of telling people what you want done; ask them in a way that will make them feel like they came up with the idea. “I’d like you to do it this way” turns into “Do you think it’s a good idea if we do it this way?”

4. Never criticize or correct. No one, and I mean no one, wants to hear that they did something wrong. If you’re looking for a de-motivator, this is it. Try an indirect approach to get people to improve, learn from their mistakes, and fix them. Ask, “Was that the best way to approach the problem? Why not? Have any ideas on what you could have done differently?” Then you’re having a conversation and talking through solutions, not pointing a finger.

5. Make everyone a leader. Highlight your top performers’ strengths and let them know that because of their excellence, you want them to be the example for others. You’ll set the bar high and they’ll be motivated to live up to their reputation as a leader.

6. Take an employee to lunch once a week. Surprise them. Don’t make an announcement that you’re establishing a new policy. Literally walk up to one of your employees, and invite them to lunch with you. It’s an easy way to remind them that you notice and appreciate their work.

7. Give recognition and small rewards. These two things come in many forms: Give a shout out to someone in a company meeting for what she has accomplished. Run contests or internal games and keep track of the results on a whiteboard that everyone can see. Tangible awards that don’t break the bank can work too. Try things like dinner, trophies, spa services, and plaques.

8. Throw company parties. Doing things as a group can go a long way. Have a company picnic. Organize birthday parties. Hold a happy hour. Don’t just wait until the holidays to do a company activity; organize events throughout the year to remind your staff that you’re all in it together.

9. Share the rewards—and the pain. When your company does well, celebrate. This is the best time to let everyone know that you’re thankful for their hard work. Go out of your way to show how far you will go when people help your company succeed. If there are disappointments, share those too. If you expect high performance, your team deserves to know where the company stands. Be honest and transparent.

Why Your Team Doesn’t Care: The 4 Ways You’re Crushing Your Culture

What Crushed Culture is: “71% of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive. This trend remained relatively stable throughout 2011.” What?

Four Steps to Cure Crushed Culture:

1)     Emotional Equity > Financial Equity. We all know what financial equity is—money—stock, comp packages, golden handcuffs. All the things we think will make people loyal to a company and keep them engaged. But this no longer works, as Gallup proves, and especially with Gen Yers and Millenials. Nope, they, like the rest of us, want to feel like we’re part of something bigger, like we’re on a glorious mission, like our work matters, like we’ll leave the world just a little better than we found it, and we want to achieve that (in part) during our work hours.
Here’s the formula:
Put energy into someone by explaining why your company is doing what it is doing, what your mission/vision/values really mean, mentor them, talk challenges out with them, pay attention to them and you’ll start to build emotional equity. That equity will now give you access to their heart, mind, Rolodex, idle thought cycles. Now they’re thinking about how to help the company innovate better, solve a specific problem, etc. as they shower and commute and whatever. That access to a person’s additional resources will enable you to influence outcomes more effectively. Now you have a shared cause, you’re on the same team, you’re safe and you belong together. It’s emotional.

2) Stop The Whining. The C suite, management, staff, everyone needs to get off what I call the Tension Triangle. This is where people bounce from victim to rescuer to persecutor. Stephen Karpman, MD, first created this as the Dreaded Drama Triangle or DDT. The DDT is comprised of three roles: Victim (the role where someone is “doing” something to them), Rescuer (who tries to remove the Victim’s suffering, often without being asked), and Persecutor (which the Victim blames for their suffering, yet the Persecutor is often feeling victimized too). David Emerald has extended this triangle, and I have extended it further. The net-net is Victims are complaining because they want something—so we help them shift to be an Outcome Creator. The Rescuer is just trying to end the suffering, so we help them become an Insight Creator by asking the right questions so the Victim can get what they need by themselves. The Persecutor is usually frustrated by trying to make things happen, so we help them become an Action Creator. Once everyone is trained in shifting their most prevalent role to a healthy alternative the whining ends. Now that’s empowerment.

Victim becomes Outcome Creator
Rescuer becomes Insight Creator
Persecutor becomes Action Creator

3) Invest ONLY for ROI. Training your team is expensive. So only do what matters. Every person in your company needs to be trained in Problem to Outcome (see Stop Whining above), Leadership Effectiveness (so they become leaders in their own right), Influencing Outcomes and Others, Accountability/Communication/Execution.  All of the above should be neuroscience-based to get far more bang for your buck. The above will cost you about $750-1,000 per person. If your people aren’t worth that amount, then embrace Crushed Culture. Because that’s the risk we’re talking about.

4)  Career Path—or Exit Strategy. Dave Peacock, President of Anheuser-Busch recently shared their refreshing approach to team member reviews.  Each team member knows exactly where they stand based on the number + letter they receive through their on-going review process.  If you’re a 4A you are such a corporate asset that your boss is obligated to promote you in a year. 4Bs must be promoted within 2 years. 3As need to be tested in a different role before they’re moved up. 3B means you’re in the right job at the right time. 2s are new in a position—it’s too early to judge. 1As are put on a recovery plan, 1Bs need to exit the company. We recommend to our clients that a team member should know their next 2 potential promotions, and what exactly they need to do to earn them. Are they loyal and engaged? Oh yes.
So the harsh reality is that we, the leaders, created Crushed Culture. Now we need to fix it.

source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecomaford/2011/11/23/why-your-team-doesnt-care-the-four-ways-youre-crushing-your-culture/2/

Understanding Human Behavior – Good vs bad. Double rooted personality based on primal instincts and intelligence as baseground of any mankind society and prediction of our future

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Wiley

Unlike to some statements, proper researched articles still drag in readers such as me. This is my first time I ...

23 October 11 at 15:17

banda

Hello.This article was really remarkable, especially since I was looking for thoughts on this issue last week.

12 December 11 at 11:00

Pay For Performance? – productivity, performance anxiety syndrom, etymology of motivation?

Approach of economists:
The surprising thing in this literature is not that productivity seems to go up when there is pay for performance, it is that it goes up by so much. It is not unusual to see productivity numbers going up by 25 per cent to 35 per cent. The most cited study that everybody talks about in this context concerns a company called Safelite. This study was conducted by Ed Lazear (Lazear, 2006). One evening Ed Lazear ended up sitting on a plane next its CEO. Safelite does one thing, if you are in a car accident and your windshield gets broken, they replace your wind shield. Over the space of three hours on the plane, the CEO decided to radically change the compensation of its windshield installers from monitoring by supervisors to commissions. Productivity went up by about 35 per cent. For other examples of such work illustrating effects on performance, see my 1999 survey.

Approach of psychologists:
On the other hand, there is a psychology literature that is going in a radically opposite direction, where it is argued that if you pay somebody on the margin to do something they will actually do less of it. As this is such a dissonant message to the economic’s viewpoint, let me begin by explaining why I think the psychology evidence needs considerably more generality before these claims can truly be at a stage where it overturns the economic work above. The experiments remain very interesting and help us understand psychological influences surrounding pay, but I do not think that they translate to most of the cases that we care about.

1.There are two central ideas that argue that sometimes pay for performance backfires in its most fundamental sense. So let me start with the example: suppose that you are a golfer and you have to make a putt that is four feet. In the first case, if you make that putt you get €5, and the second case if you make that putt you get €5 million. In which of the two are you more likely to make the putt? So think about the economic example. The economist would say that because it is worth €5 million to me I concentrate more on making the putt and I am more likely to make it. What psychologists argue is the opposite. While they may agree that the golfer wants to do better when €5 million is on the line, they argue that he may not be able to translate that desire into performance due to a physiological response to the stakes. Specifically, there could be a nervousness effect or an arousal effect whereby he becomes so nervous because its worth €5 million that he misses, he is more likely to miss.

Something I would call performance anxiety syndrom.

2.The second version of what psychologists often talk about in the context of agency theory is what happens in circumstances where you intrinsically enjoy something. The idea here is simply that once you are being paid for doing something you inherently enjoy it less. So without pay for performance I am in ‘I think I am doing this as it is fun’ mode – when I get paid, now I am doing it for the money. If that attribution is important enough then what happens is people can end up working less hard. So in my language, this is the cost of working hard. Going back to the basic model, the objective function of the agent is then to maximise.

This point would relate probably to etymology of motivation.

The score is 2 against 1.

Practical research welcomed. If any of you has any data to share in this matter feel free to contact me zbigniew.gargasz@gmail.com

source: The Economic and Social Review, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer, 2011, pp. 113–134
What Have We Learnt About Pay For Performance?
Geary Lecture Winter 2010CANICE PRENDERGAST*
University of Chicago, USA
http://www.esri.ie/UserFiles/publications/jacb201139/GLS40.pdf