By Alex Sellers, Director of Learning and Development at Turning Factor
There are countless articles and books written on the subject of motivation, and in particular, how to get the most out of our employees in the workplace. It is fairly clear that there is no one set of step-by-step rules to encourage people to maintain 110% effort 100% of the time.
Motivation can be defined as energy. Consider for a moment how you feel when you are motivated or demotivated. Are you energised? Are you engaged? Or do you feel lacklustre, tired and stressed? If we have too many people in our teams and businesses who are consistently demotivated, then the impact can be dramatic and difficult to recover. It is well known that negativity breeds negativity – when people feel isolated, frustrated and disengaged, the natural inclination is to pull other people into that world to create justification for these negative feelings. The literal opposite is true of teams and organisations where there are high levels of motivation and engagement – there is a competitive advantage to having high levels of motivation present across your organisation.
What is clear is that beyond strategy, structure, traditional performance management and organisational objective setting lies a universal and underpinning truth.
This truth is that people in the workplace have a choice about how much and what kind of energy they put into the work they do. This is called ‘discretionary effort’ and that there are many factors that can influence this choice. It is our role, as leaders and managers, to understand these factors and, therefore, what influences people’s levels of motivation.
So what can we do as leaders to encourage our people to remain focussed and engaged in their activities? Studies show that people are more engaged in their work through the right balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors.
Let’s look for a second at Frederick Herzberg’s ‘Two Factor theory of Motivation’, a widely accepted theory, which he developed in 1959 following a study of over 200 professional workers at the Ford Motor Factory. Herzberg suggests that there are two principal and different areas of need in the workplace that affect satisfaction and motivation. His work follows on from Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ and is classified in the group of motivational studies that are based around human beings’ desire to satisfy a need.
Herzberg stated that there are two distinct areas that we as leaders and managers need to pay attention to. The first of these areas he called hygiene factors, and they include things like working conditions, relationships with our peers and supervisors and, interestingly, pay. He found that the perceived absence of any of these factors would create dissatisfaction and he also found that if these factors were sufficiently present (in the perception of the workers), they would not increase levels of motivation, they would simply prevent dissatisfaction. The second of these two areas he referred to as motivators and these included things like achievement, recognition, responsibility, growth and the nature of the work itself. He found that when these factors were sufficiently present, they could positively motivate and when they were not present, they could demotivate. The two factors exist separately and the factors lead to positve motivation are fundamentally different nature to those that lead to dissatisfaction.
The beauty in Herzberg’s theory lies not in the precise validity (which has been challenged due to the size of the control group) but in how we look at the things that are important to us and our teams in the workplace. Consider for a second how you feel or felt when you got a pay rise. I am sure there would have been the flush of excitement, the thoughts of what we could do with the money and the added security … but how long did these feelings last? Now consider for a second the deeper reward that a pay increase gives us. Surely the pay increase has more meaning when we understand that it is a recognition of our value to the organisation that has garnered this increase. Herzberg found that the two most important motivating factors were achievement and recognition. He also found that hygiene factors had to be present to avoid dissatisfaction, but could not in themselves alone increase levels of motivation.
So, when we are in our businesses and our teams perhaps it is not enough to simply address the working conditions, environment or get the exciting new gadget. We need to be paying very close attention to how we are challenging, enriching, supporting and recognising our individuals and teams for the work that they do.
To consistently encourage high levels of motivation we should be looking to empower, challenge and engage our team members and ensure that we support and recognise their hard work and efforts towards our mutual goals. As managers, we should be constantly on the look out for things that we think are motivating our team, but are actually hygiene factors. The point is that we have to work hard to encourage positive motivation and we have to have the courage and self-awareness to challenge our own preconceptions of what truly motivates an individual. Simply put, we have to invest our time and energy to see the results. But when we do, those results will be dramatic and inspiring.
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