Improving Employee Motivation

Business owners and managers realize how critical employee motivation is to the success of a business and many have made significant investments towards this end from sending their workforce to employee motivation seminars, hiring professionals to give motivational trainings and setting up various rewards programs and implement wage increases.

Studies on employee motivation have taught companies that there are factors, aside from financial incentives, which increase employee motivation more such as whether employees find their work meaningful or if the work environment is stimulating. Studies have also shown that extrinsic motivators have a shorter effect on employee motivation than intrinsic motivators. Moreover, it is also known that employees respond to the same motivators differently.

However, despite all the insights on employee motivation, many companies still struggle with keeping their employees, facing high turn-over rates and low productivity. This is because knowing all the theories on employee motivation is only the first step to actually motivating the workforce. Half of the challenge is creating a culture in the workplace that inspires employee motivation and boosts morale.

Putting in place an employee motivation program is not enough if the principles behind it are not present in the entire organization. Giving employees a bonus for exceeding production quotas, for instance, is just a short-term remedy in improving productivity. Oftentimes, such initiatives tend to create a fluctuating pattern of employee motivation.

What businesses need is integration wherein the whole company, from top to bottom, operates under a single philosophy and culture that fosters high employee morale, which results to real motivation in employees. In other words, every practice in management should correspond with the company's efforts to improve employee motivation. Ensuring consistency in management and employee motivation strategies is the solution.

This approach may seem complicated or abstract at first but there are very simple ways to do this, the best would be for everyone in management positions to practice what they preach to their employees. For example, if your company wants to address attendance and tardiness issues they would most likely implement an attendance bonus program to motivate employees to report for work on time everyday. However, it would not help the company's efforts if some team supervisors often show up late for work. This creates a mixed message of what the company believes in.


Therefore, it is very important that officials and managers have a clear understanding of their role in employee motivation so that their actions will always be consistent with the company's efforts, resulting to more effective employee motivation programs.