Managing Motivation

“Motivation is like fire: unless you continue to add fuel, it will go out.”
(Shiv Khera, Indian author and motivational speaker, You Can Win)

12 Best Practices for Employee Motivation in the Workplace

Motivation impacts much human behavior and is especially important in the workplace. Perhaps the most vital thing to realize in terms of trying to influence motivation is that people will do something—including changing their behavior—only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interest as defined by their own values.

According to Marshall Goldsmith from his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: “For me to get you do what I want, I have to prove that doing so will benefit you in some way, immediately or somewhere down the road. This is natural law. Every choice, big or small, is a risk-reward decision where your bottom-line thinking is, “What’s in it for me?”

What to Keep in Mind

In my experience, there are five key things we need to keep in mind regarding motivation:

• You can’t motivate anybody to do anything they don’t want to do; motivation is internal.
• You can only create an environment in which people become self-motivated.
• All people are motivated. The person who stays in bed in the morning rather than getting up and going to work is more motivated to stay in bed than to work. They might be negatively motivated, but they are nonetheless motivated.
• People do things for their reasons, not for yours. Find out what their reasons are.
• You can’t motivate people, but you can help them. Just as you can’t motivate a seed to grow (you can only provide an appropriate environment that will allow it to grow), you can’t motivate people.

On The Job: Negative vs. Positive

When you are in charge of other people in a work environment, as a supervisor, manager, owner, etc., you are faced with many challenges. One of the biggest is how to motivate them. A paycheck or pay raise is not always enough nor should it be the only motivator. You cannot rely on your employees to be as intrinsically motivated as you might be to give your all for the good of the company.

Not too many years ago, managers believed that fear was the father of respect. A good manager would be rated high in ability to assign blame or to instill fear. This approach finally translated into the carrot and the stick theory of motivation — the carrot of monetary reward and the stick of fear. This theory had another false assumption. It assumed that people were basically lazy, disliked work, had to be driven and needed both a carrot and a stick. It assumed people were incapable of taking responsibility for themselves and had to be looked after.

The reality is that fear can achieve results, but its effect is very short-term. Over time, instead of being motivational, fear becomes a demotivator — with a corresponding impact on managerial results.

The 12 Best Practices for Employee Motivation

The following 12 best practices are proven to be motivators for your employees.

1. Motivating employees starts with motivating yourself
2. Listen to employees and understand their needs and desires
3. Determine specifically what you want them to do
4. Key to supporting the motivation of your employees is understanding what motivates each of them
5. State what you want them to do in terms that will appeal to their individuality
6. Set conditions that will enable them to try to do what you want without immediate failure
7. Take proactive, appropriate actions to help employees achieve their needs and desires
8. Hold people accountable for their actions or inactions and ensure employees have well-defined and mutually agreed roles and responsibilities
9. Conduct frequent meetings with all employees
10. Display a positive “can do” attitude with a blend of realism and practicality
11. Develop and live by a code of conduct that includes honesty, integrity, mutual respect, and so forth
12. When an employee does what you want them to do, recognize and praise immediately, especially in public

Inspiration is unquestionably the most powerful and lasting force in forming positive attitudes which will induce employees to make fuller use of their potential.

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing— that’s why we recommend it daily.”
(Zig Ziglar)