16 Ways to Motivate Employees and Celebrate Their Successes

Motivational methods are effective when they are aimed at individual satisfaction

A leader’s primary function is to help employees develop a strong belief in the company’s mission and the importance of their individual jobs. His secondary function is to ensure optimal results from delegated assignments and tasks. Excellent results can spring from motivation that actually helps employees feel successful and increases their efforts in achieving their goals.

Employees are the chief resource leaders can use to maintain and enhance their leadership abilities. Therefore, understanding and applying appropriate motivational methods for employees about delegated assignments is important for leaders. By motivating each employee to perform at her maximum level of efficiency, leaders also maximize their own success. Furthermore, as leaders motivate their people, they not only help the company gain financially but also develop personal relationships between themselves and their employees.

…

Want to continue?

By logging in you agree to receive communication from Quality Digest. Privacy Policy.

Create a FREE account

Forgot My Password

Comments

Thought provoking, but not very Lean

Thank you for this thought provoking article. I found it to be useful in many respects, but one thing kept niggling as I read it: it is not fully "Lean". For example I like the idea that leaders should recognise that what motivates one person can be different to another, so that incentives should be modified accordingly, but I didn't like the idea that incentives should be linked to performance. This is because, from Lean and Systems Thinking, we know that most of the variation in any process comes from the process itself and not from the people. Also, rewarding performance carries with it the negative connotation of "I don't believe you're trying to do your best so I'm going to 'incentivise' you to do better".

So while I agree with much of what is written here, there is still too much tradtional command and control type thinking to really chime.

How would I do it? I'd adjust the incentives according to the needs of the people concerned. For example research has shown that for highly mechanistic activities, people react well to remunerative incentives - therefore workers on a production line could be offered incentives related to production output (but see note below). Whereas "knowledge workers" are not incentivised by money and in fact their performance can deteriorate if working on a performance related incentive scheme. For them it is often the intrinsic value that they feel they are adding that motivates them (which is why things like Apache Server, Linux and Wikipedia exist) - so incentives related to the value they create would be more appropriate.

Note: and even production line workers can be more effectively incentivised than the traditional performance model outlined above. For example you can give workers more variation in their activities - this increases their feeling that they are contributiong something of value and more in control of their own work.

I realise this article touches on other aspects too, but I have picked on this one as an example of where I think more Lean thinking could have been applied in general.