Motivating Employees

I once asked a question to my tuition teacher Mr God when I was primary 6. “Is it easy to become a boss and manage your employees?” At that time, Mr Goh was (till now) a boss with 3 tuition centres around Kuala Lumpur, and under him there were a lot of highly calibre teachers from various schools as well as all the clerks.

He then answered answered sincerely to a 12 year-old kid “It is easy to become a boss, but not easy to become a leader. A boss can manage all his employees just with money, but a leader should go beyond financial incentives, including motivating employees using right methods“.

Motivating employees: Going beyond financial incentives

Its high time executives become more strategic than general. It is becoming a fact that employees are no longer going after incentives in terms of cash, bonus, holidays and other benefits merely. To motivate employees better, a leader needs to be in the shoe of employees, which is to go beyond financial incentives. So, how do you apply the strategy? First, you need to decide what to do, when to do it, and finally execution – getting it done.

These skills are both critical for a modern leader.

Yet, perhaps the most vital expertise lies among the three — in the sphere of an organization: (1) organizational structures and coordination, (2) programs to guide and inspire the actions of workers and (3) the crucial task of designing new ways in motivating employees.

CEOs running even a midsize corporation can’t supervise every employee or imagine that instructions from the center of an organization will in the end – be genuinely executed.There should be a distribution of authority and accountability, structures of control and assessment executed and incentives to promote desired behavior created.

Principally, a CEO must impart the corporation’s strategy with an implication not just among the ranks, but also for hundreds of workers down the stream.

The argument has often been financial as the only motivation that could make a difference.

Irrespective of what to motivating staff members to reach climax performance – it should be managed and balanced.  Intense focused motivation in one area could end up weakening other structures of an organization.

So how do you get the most from your staff members? Here, I am going to share with you some pointers to get you ahead in motivating employees the healthier way:

Motivating employees lies in performance . . .

Of course, fiscal performance is crucial to any business; and everything is measured by looking at returns on investment (ROI), economic value added (EVA), cash flows, net income, profit and loss and so forth. But can financials alone be enough to quantify either performance or health?

At the outset, performance should be understood more broadly.

Right, most companies do look outside the financials so as to measure operational performance— for example: the percentage of phone calls answered at a specific floor of a call center, or in pharmaceutical company, the total sum of drugs approved.

But other essential dimensions are observed periodically, if at all. And such is the organizational performance that has minimal outcome on both performance and health compared to those of operational.

Very low retention rates as well as poor succession planning, for instance, are as distressing as poor maintenance.

Marketplace performance should be the other aspect of performance.

You’ve probably heard of the exhortation “the customer is always right”, but what does this really mean?

Well, it can be quantified by the fraction of satisfied customers, the number of customers who would recommend a company to friends, and lastly, the height of customer attrition.

What about health . . .?

Yet a broader view of performance, in it itself, can’t be enough to address an organization’s health.

Running an organization, whether in the public or private sector, delivery of results isn’t just for the moment.

Of course, stakeholders have keen interest in the current performance, nonetheless they also expect management to maintain that level as well as improve on it.

A good example is a football coach, who’s not only expected to win games and bring titles home, but build a team with profundity and strength for upcoming seasons, ensure there’s new talent in place and the club attracts more supporters.

The right place to begin in real motivating employees lies in its metrics, however defining the paramount ones, whether it’s for performance or health, is not easy.

And to find these metrics depends on the traditions and strategy of a company to the extent in which the industry competes.

Defining an organization’s metrics (be it: customers, employees, and communities (or association, marketplace and network, in that order.) makes it feasible to take the kind of clear-headed look at its health.

Heading the right direction

With the footing now all set, entrenching the model of motivating employees into an organization’s performance-management structure is not only vital, but it ensures workers put their peek efforts into things the company fundamentally did measure.

Even though entrenching health in this manner is the cleanest signal of management’s objective, it is hardly ever enough.

Management, for instance, must also ensure that the workers holding key posts uphold the right mind-set and corporate ethics, and act to secure the next generation of consumers.

True, institutional challenges have often confronted leaders at the top.

Today, in a business environment marked by sudden change, enduring but unpredictable globalization, and the intricate objectives of stakeholder value, corporate stability and social responsibility and, the chore of motivating employees to get the organization in the right direction is more imperative than ever.

Take Motivating Employees seriously

Many leaders or CEOs have been ignoring this issue for years. It is painful to see employees feeling lost, despair, unmotivated when they come to work, as if their soul is still left at home. It is even more painful to see leaders started to blame shift their employees when company performance, sales or revenue is low. Motivate every employee, treat him/her seriously so in reciprocal, then the employee will work hard for the company.

“No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care” - Theodore Roosevelt

(Special thanks to Dennis, a new friend of mine for sharing this information. If you intend to share your motivation to our readers, do drop me an email at Contact Us. )

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