Every year people make New Years resolutions. For too many people, those resolutions are too soon forgotten and ignored.
Does that have anything to do with motivation?
To a degree – yes! I believe that it is about how we channel our motivation and keep it going.
I believe that most people are highly motivated to achieve their New Years resolutions whether it focus on weight loss or being a better parent. Just as we are motivated to achieve certain goals at work, and yet often fail. The problem is usually not in the initial stages where everyone is excited about the new resolution or goal (go to a gym in the next week or two and see how crowded it is). The problem occurs when that initial excitement wains, and we fall back into the comfortable and routine. We might try to regain that edge after one or two fall-off the wagon episodes, but pretty soon we tend to just ignore it or forget about it all together.
What we need is to have a motivational engine that keeps us going. We need to fill that motivational engine with the right type of gas and make sure that the engine is tuned up and ready to go. We need to make sure that we have enough gas to refill when it starts running low. We need to know when to get it tuned up and change the oil. We need to make sure that we can fix it when it breaks down.
I think all of our motivational engines are within us. It is the scheduled maintenance and filling it up that we so often lag on. What type of gas do you run on? Is it a personal motivation? Does it require a reward? Is it social? Does it need the turbo power of passion? Is it a mixture of all four?
In order to achieve our goals we need to understand this about us and put elements in place to ensure that we fill our tank regularly and do all the scheduled maintenance required.
What about you – what’s your motivational fuel for 2011?
Here is a question that I’ve been asking myself all day long in between surfing the web to find out about the latest Timberwolve’s news, great after Christmas specials, the East Coast’s version of a Minnesota winter, and seeing what all my facebook buddies are up to – do the holiday’s sap employee motivation? Or at a minimum, employee energy?
I know they do for me.
Which is a problem since this is our busy time of year. Normally, I’m lucky to get Christmas day off but this year I actually got three days off – that is a record I haven’t had in over 10 years! With those three days came a lot of family celebration, festive eating, lots of visiting and much time playing with the kids.
Ok, this is a little bit of a teaser…we are in the process of doing a major overhaul of how we look at the 4-Drive Model. We’ve talked about the need to update this model before (see here and here). We are underway in getting that developed and should be launching it the first quarter of 2011.
Here is a sneak peak…the four main motivations as we’ve defined them are now renamed and constitute different elements:
1. Personal Motivation- focus on the intrinsic motivators that we have and encompasses the Drive to Challenge & Comprehend
2. Reward Motivation- focus is on the extrinsic motivators that we have and encompasses the Drive to Acquire & Achieve
3. Social Motivation- focus is on the social drives that motivate us and includes the Drive to Bond & Belong
4. Passion Motivation (this name is still being hotly debated – but for now its what we are running with)… – focus is on the motivational element of purpose and passion – including defending one’s honor and tribe
As the hiring outlook improves with anticipation of the new calendar year on the horizon, election dust settling and corporate tax liability gaining clarity, the talent exodus will begin in next few months.
Are you ready?
If your organization has not installed proactive mitigation efforts, you could lose your best talent over the next 2 quarters (in other words, if your not doing something now, you’re going to pay for it later). Successful recession recovery strategy should not ignore the critical variable of having the best talent on-board as well as engaging the “survivors”, lest ye not forget;
“High-commitment organizations outperform low-commitment organizations by 47%”
Watson Wyatt
“Engaged employees are 43% more productive.”
The Hay Group
Our research shows that engaged employees can increase your financial position by almost 200% while disengaged employees can decrease your financial position by almost 25%.
“In high-growth organizations, 84% of employees know where the organization is headed. In low-growth organizations, only 52% do.”
In Momentum
“Dependence on remote forms of communication has left many younger workers bereft of interpersonal skills.:
Fast Company
“Camaraderie between co-workers fuels much more than new business leads – relationships are also key drivers for recruiting, engagement and retention.”
Talent Management Magazine
Must we go on with the quotes? These are some pretty credible sources I might add.
Counter-intuitively, organizations tend to find difficulty prioritizing their employee engagement efforts during challenging environments. In fact, during this recession many have executed a status quo strategy, which communicates to their single greatest resource that you are “damn lucky to still be here”. Take a moment to think about this – has this been your organizations approach to engagement?
Therein lies the issue! If we tell our recession survivors they’re lucky to have a job and yet we label them our greatest remaining resource, we are sending mixed messages.
Employee engagement health is at its worst levels in decades. Loyalty between employees and organizations has been damaged through this most recent recession as a result of massive workforce reductions, increased stressed on the “survivors” with no prospect of reward post-recovery. We’ve lost perspective of what “engagement” really means, therefore we must remind ourselves of the definition of “Engagement”:
An engagement is a promise to marry, and also the period of time between proposal and marriage – which may be lengthy or trivial. During this period, a couple is said to be affianced,betrothed,engaged to be married, or simply engaged. Future brides and bridegrooms are often referred to as fiancées or fiancés respectively (from the French word fiancé). The duration of the courtship varies vastly.
Source Wikipedia, September 2010
This definition depicts a marital engagement, however it sounds nothing like the employee/employer relationship of today. In years past, young employees would land a job with General Mills, GM or Geritol and remain with those companies until retirement. These companies would hire the formative young workers, instill values and goals consistent with their long-term vision and values which, drove and supported their business strategy. This model has been changing for a long time but the last 3 years has left employers in a precarious position.
Manpower’s Workforce Strategy Survey, released September 27th, shows that many organizations are not thinking strategically about the workforce they’ll need for long-term strategic growth—most are thinking only about the here and now and are not positioned to build the workforce they’ll need to achieve the company’s business strategy in the future. This is quite concerning for Wall Street regarding long-term economic recovery. Investors should focus on employers that have prioritized these 3 key people strategies:
Talent acquisition and alignment with business strategy
“The data reveals that almost a quarter of employers across 36 countries and territories concede that their organizations’ workforce strategy does not support their business strategy, or don’t know if it does. Among those two subsets of respondents, 53 percent admit they are not taking steps to address this issue. With the talent mismatch—the inability to find the right skills in the right place at the right time—becoming more acute as the global economy thaws, companies risk being without the skills they need to execute their business strategy”.
“In addition, among employees surveyed in this study, large sections are still in the dark about how their contributions support the business—one in five employees say either that they don’t understand their company’s business strategy or they don’t know how their role supports it.” (emphasis added)
SOURCE Manpower Inc.
So, what are some engagement drivers that organizations could begin to practice to retain their key talent, re-engage them with business strategy, and invest in their long-term retention and development? Over the next few weeks I’ll explore those themes and make provide some insight. For now, I would like to get your thoughts – leave some ideas in the comment area below.
About Paul; Paul is a successful marketing and business development professional with experience in several industries over more than 20 years. During this period he’s worked for Gage Marketing Group, BI (Business Incentives), Korn/Ferry International as well as founding his own company. He was most recently with Korn/Ferry International as Global Director of Marketing in their talent management consulting division.
We do a lot of work helping improve how teams operate. Some of it is straight old fun team building – you know the type where you go off-site for a day and do different types of games and activities (note – some people love these types of programs and others detest them with a passion). Other programs we do are much more intense and involve really working on specific team issues and developing action plans for greater collaboration, communication, or productivity.
We’ve worked with big teams. We’ve worked with small teams. We’ve done programs for executives and for line-workers. We’ve worked with teams that are working well and just want to get to that next level and teams that really are on their last leg and need immediate urgent care or they will implode.
We have done one hour fun sessions. We’ve created on-going programs that last months and require intensive work by the participants.
Regardless of the type of team development we are doing – it is also part of building a more motivational organization.
I’m linking to this blog as it has a great post that highlights some of the “old school” thinking that is still out there. It amazes me that in this day and age there are still managers that believe that showing appreciation is a bad thing….
What is it that drives meaning in work? True, real meaning that goes beyond the obvious “completed this project” or “achieved that goal”? I have some ideas, but would love to hear what other people have to say first. I’ll keep a track of the responses we get and put up another post on this with some ideas at a later time.
So please, leave a thought in the comment section!
