You haven’t missed the point of employee motivation – have you?

July 30, 2009 in Book | 4 comments

Top of the World 4What a delight to find someone else who recognises that companies have missed the point of employee motivation, by focussing on external rather than internal issues. It is the last vestige of ‘command & control’ management thinking, and arrogant in the extreme, to think that you – as an employer – can motivate your people! Will Marre – the co-founder of and former president of the Covey Leadership Centre and CEO of the REALeadership Alliance – recently made the point tellingly, stating that “by trying to create great companies that are ‘great places to work’ instead of igniting motivation from within” have missed the point.

You can read a fuller account of his address to senior HR executives and CEOs at the recent Employee of Choice Forum in San Diego here, but it is worth emphasising his comment, “The key is training all employees to think and act in ways that add value to both our future and our bottom lines. … Meaningful work occurs when workers harness their strengths, interests and creativity to create real value.”  The problem is that you cannot do this while not looking at the whole person.

The focus on roles and competencies means you are not looking at the total person. Yet people are incapable of physically dividing themselves, which means you have to recognise that you pay them for what is effectively 30% of their life each day. For them not focus 100% of their capabilities on the task at hand at any point during their day is to waste a portion of that life, and to short-change both them and yourself as the employer, and is the real, root cause of employee disengagement.

It may not be perfect, but valuing people as assets, putting them on the balance sheet and making them co-owners of the business is the best way of redressing this injustice and making individual and organisation alike more effective. It is the start of “igniting motivation from the inside out” – the only way you can really do it!

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  1. Joanne Milne on July 31, 2009 at 9:21 am

    Hi Bay, thanks for your request for comments. I agree with your extrinsic v intrinsic motivation argument regarding people, however I got a little lost about the leap to making employees co-owners of the business (I haven’t read the link to the Covey Inst so perhaps it is proposed there).

    The cognitive psychologist’s view (and mine) is that people in work have very different expectations from one another, and it is the nature of the individual’s expectation that drives their satisfaction level, and therefore their motivation. Very much in the same way that it is not the events themselves that stress us out, but rather the view that we as individuals take of them.

    Not everyone wants to be an owner of the organisation is one thought I have. I remember the research at the production plants of the Luton car manufacturers (UK) which demonstrated many factory workers as wanting to come to work, get paid and be allowed to do the things they truly enjoy and that really matter outside of work – their families, hobbies, etc. This was referred to as having an “instrumental attitude to work”. This research is possibly out of date now given these production plants no longer exist!

    Giving serious consideration to the structure of the working environment with regards to reducing unnecessary stress is as close as I can get to addressing the motivational issue on a global scale. In the UK a standard was introduced to legally ensure that organisations comply with establishing a healthy working environment. I find this a useful aide memoire for organisations attempting introducing a one-stop “enabling environment” (the standard talks about how demands; control; support; relationships; role; impact of change affect most people). Here’s the link if interested:

    http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/index.htm

  2. Steve Hearsum on August 11, 2009 at 9:44 am

    Hi Bay,

    I agree with what seems to be a central plank of your post, namely that motivating employees has to recognize that people spend the majority of their life outside of the organisational boundary, therefore what motivates them is likely to be substantially ‘out of sight’, more often than not ‘out of mind’, certainly to the employee and even more so the employer. I am not so sure about the notion that “valuing people as assets, putting them on the balance sheet and making them co-owners of the business is the best way of redressing this injustice and making individual and organisation alike more effective.” That seems to assume that people want to be thought of as assets, or co-owners. I also find myself curious as to what might be termed the ‘discourse of effectiveness’. What I mean by that is that effectiveness can mean many things to many people e.g. to the employer it might be work harder for less, particularly in the current climate. I wonder what employees would define ‘effective’ as being?…

    Thought provoking, so thank-you!

    Steve

  3. admin on August 17, 2009 at 10:12 am

    Joanne

    Thank you for your very thoughtful and constructive comments.

    I certainly agree that people’s motivation levels and hence their satisfation levels are all different, and for that reason I think it is a no-win situation to try to develop organisational strategies to achieve either of those goals. My objective is simply to create an environment in which people can more easily motivate themselves and thus achieve more personal satisfaction. As you say stress is a personal response to a situation, and can be just as easily stimulated by the obessession of a would-be high-achiever as by unrealistic demands of an overbearing manager. I therefore don’t have any issue with the stress standards that you referred me to and think the solution I am proposing probably offers the best way to achieve them, and a healthy environment with the least effort.

    Indeed I would say there is more than sufficient evidence to show that higher performing organisations are those where people have the highest level of engagement and thus as a natural corollary they must have people who are motivated and better satisfied, and less stressed. There is also enough evidence to indicate that employee-owned companies are generally market leaders in their respective fields.

    I therefore submit that greater employee ownership offers a win-win and needs to be more actively promoted. I suspect that employee resistance to ownership is precisely the consequence of compartmentalised thinking that sees work and life as two different things, and the inevitable consequence of too much top-down, “command and control” management. The failure of the companies you cite is clear evidence of that.

    Albeit with possible economic constraints, we all choose where to work, and for that reason could be said to work for ourselves. If you accept that as a staring premise, there is every reason why people would want to be co-owners of the business. Don’t you think it just needs a better selling job?

    Bay

    The fact is

  4. admin on August 17, 2009 at 10:28 am

    Steve

    Thank you too for your comments, which also add a worthwhile element to the discussion.

    I think I have partially addressed the outside/inside perspective in my response Joanne. Just let me add, that we spend approximately 50% of our waking life at work, and thus it seems to me that makes it imperative to find a way of aligning our abilities/interests with what we do at work. The failure to do this is what I call human economic waste, and is a huge cost to both the individual as well as society, let alone to the effectiveness of the organisation. What I am proposing is a means of trying to solve that problem. Is it perfect? Probably not. The problem is I don’t see any other alternatives being put forward and if we can eliminate even a significant part of that human economic waste it has to be a massive improvement.

    You pose an interesting question in asking what you think the employees would consider to be effective, but at a micro-level I am sure the overwhelming response would be the freedom to do their job to the best of their ability, and eliminate all the things that prevent this. Often this may be management and the bureaucracy imposed by managers and I would like to think this approach of treating people as assets would be a catalyst in breaking down such barriers to improved performance, simply by engendering a more collaborative team-based focus.

    Bay