You Can't Motivate Your Employees

In every corporate culture, there comes a discussion about how to motivate the employees.  More often than not, these discussions come at a time when the business is faltering or having difficult times.  A business needs to push ahead, increase revenue and profitability, grow market share or any other number of growth ideals.  In order to do that, they need to get the most out of their employees.  At this point, a business must make that difficult decision on how to get their work force to be more productive.  What is the correct way to motivate your employees?

As the title of this post says, you can’t motivate your employees.

If you’ve gotten to the point where you need to determine how to motivate your employees because your business needs immediate growth, more likely than not, looking to motivate your employees may be too little too late. 

Every employee at every company is capable of doing more and doing it better than they are currently doing.  This is not a quantifiable fact, but a theoretical one based on the logic that humans by nature are capable of extraordinary effort when they are in a situation where they are motivated to do so.  No sane person would jump in front of a moving vehicle just because someone asked them to (unless they are a Hollywood stuntman), but put their child in the way and the vast majority of them would risk it to save their child.

I’m not saying you need to put your employee’s children in front of moving vehicles, but the point of the analogy is that employee motivation stems from the individual, not the company.

I’ve seen a number of different ways that corporations have tried to motivate their employees:

-          Give them more money – This might be a short term fix for some of the more financially motivated employees.  The problem with this motivation is that you are giving more money to an employee who more than likely has learned to live on what they are already making.  Giving them more money and then asking them to do more will more than likely mean you will have higher paid employees doing the same amount of work.

-          Threaten them – While this sounds very old school in the business world of today, it happens very often.  Telling an employee that if they don’t improve they will lose their job will most likely result in an employee doing the bare minimum to keep their job while they search for another one.  Most of your employees have had jobs before they came to work for you, while having to go and look for one isn’t a great prospect, it’s not a gamble you always want to take, and more often than not, it ends up with you getting a little more effort in the short term and then having to find someone to replace them.

-          Appeal to their loyalty – Companies seem to have a pretty big ego when it comes to dealing with their employees.  Asking an employee to dig deeper in a time of need because they company needs them to may work for a small group of employees, but the majority of them will start looking for reasons that they aren’t the ones who caused the problems and it’s your job to make sure they still have a job tomorrow. 

-          Dangle a carrot – Companies can’t always afford to give employees raises or promotions, so they do the next best thing and tell the employees if they can get them through the tough times, the pot of gold will be waiting on the other side for them.  What you are really telling your employee is that their worth is only based on the how well the company is doing and not the value they believe they are adding on a daily basis.

All of these methods have one thing in common.  They make the employee feel like an employee instead of being part of something. The employee is not given control of their own destiny.  You could argue that  The other common side effect is that you are excluding them from your circle of trust.  Making a companywide decision on how to motivate all of the employees within that company is making a blanket statement that you know better than the individual how to motivate them.

Motivation is an employee based ideal, not a company based one.  A business is defined and carried out by the individuals they choose to employ.  Making a decision about what motivates them has the same detrimental effect to a company as trying to tell your customers what they want and how they want it.

Effective businesses understand that when they say their business is employee based, they mean it.  No business can make all of their employees happy all of the time, but when the majority of them feel like they are part of the decision making process and have a close relationship with their employees, the employees can motivate themselves into putting in the extra effort needed with nothing more than a request.  In great companies, the request doesn’t even have to be made because the employees are in tune with what is going on and have their own accountability and motivation to push forward.

These same businesses know that the motivational process and the involvement process begins with the hiring process.  Understanding who you are hiring, what they are looking for in a job, and what motivates them as an individual is key in the development of an employee based, self-motivated work force.  Having this information, and using it during the training process, employee reviews and on-going coaching is an excellent way to stay in touch with the needs and requirements of your employees.