There are so many ideas thrown around about how to motivate employees.
Fundamentally is it not about having a clear Purpose that your employees will want to jump out of bed for on a cold and wet Monday morning to achieve?
We overhauled our business model and value proposition at Collingwood nearly 3 years ago. Although we were a very profitable business that had clients queuing up to work with us, when we sat around a table and ask our team if we were enjoying what we did, the resounding response was NO!! So the financials were working for everyone but we were all miserable!
A few years on we now have a Value Proposition that excites us and one which adds value to our clients, our candidates and our employees. It has been a very hard and painful journey but allows us to open our eyes each Monday morning and know why we turn up for work and MONEY is not our primary motivation.
I agree with this article in that employees are more motivated when they are adding value to both themselves and their key stakeholders.
Hundreds of studies in management and psychology have examined how organizations can increase worker motivation. Most theories, grounded in the job design literature, argue for redesigning or recrafting jobs — for example, by adding variety or increasing autonomy to people’s work. As I discussed in another post, Brad Staats of the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill and I demonstrated the success of these approaches by analyzing 2 ½ years of transaction data from a unit at a Japanese bank that processes applications for home loans. Mortgage processing involved 17 distinct tasks, including scanning applications, inputting application data, and doing a credit check. We found that adding variety to the tasks workers completed from day to day (by having them working on different distinct tasks rather than focusing on the same one) improved their motivation and productivity.
https://hbr.org/2017/03/to-motivate-employees-show-them-how-theyre-helping-customers
