Agile Know-How Magazine • Fall 2017
Many companies regularly conduct internal employee engagement surveys throughout the year.
Employee motivation and engagement is a very hot topic in many organizations. Many companies regularly conduct internal employee engagement surveys throughout the year. Some managers dread receiving the survey results, while others thrive on them.
Gallup’ s 2017 annual employee engagement survey shows that over 70 % of American employees are disengaged. That is a frightening statistic! It speaks a lot about the leadership teams and cultures present within organizations!
In this article, we will look at employee motivation from many different angles. We will discuss what helps us create it and how we sometimes destroy it.
How do we motivate people in organizations?
We try to motivate and engage people in a funny way in most organizations. Often, we try to motivate people using financial rewards. So we set a goal and then reward people if they reach it. If they do not reach it, then we do not give the reward.
What I have just described is partly the annual goal setting and review process of many companies. The problem is that in some companies, there is a big flaw in this system. At the end of the year, when they prepare employee reviews, they compare them to one another using a bell curve. This is a game where the end goal may not be to deliver on promised rewards to everyone. Pushed to the extreme, we demotivate valuable employees by not recognizing their achievements. We also demotivate them by focusing on negative aspects to justify their evaluation.
The worst of this is when we take things out of context to support these performance reviews.
These false conversations kill the motivation and engagement of even the best employees. The irony is that this is happening for completely the wrong reasons. Isn’ t it funny that we seek to motivate using a flawed paradigm that can demotivate people?
Rewarding behaviour, and not only results
The system of rewarding employees for meeting goals does not always take into account how people reach them. For example, imagine rewarding your best salesperson for closing record sales this year. You would want to reward this person to keep them motivated, right?
Now imagine this person is the best because they stole clients from team members. Would you still reward this person? What message would you be giving to the rest of your team? What would it say about what you value as an organization?
Focus on giving small rewards for the behaviours you want to see in your organization. This will motivate people to keep doing these things. Having more and more people with the right habits will create the results you want.
People need to be in the right chair doing the right things to light up and bring their best work to the table
Rewarding the whole and not the parts
When building high-performing teams, how can we motivate people to work better together? Part of the solution lies once again in what you reward and what you believe in.
Many performance review systems focus on having individual goals. This, in turn, creates measurements around the perfor-
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