Eight North

New business realities require organizations to find new and innovative ways to involve employees in the workplace.  To be competitive, every company needs to get extraordinary performance, even from ordinary employees.  No matter how good or how educated management is, companies still rely on the average Joe to get the work done.  Traditional methods of motivating employees - either with carrots (promotions or cash) or with sticks (intimidation or firing) - are no longer effective in the workplace. 

As Peter Drucker has observed; “Economic incentives are becoming rights rather than rewards.  Merit raises are always introduced as rewards for exceptional performance.  In no time at all they become a right.  To deny a merit raise or to grant only a small one becomes punishment.  The increasing demand for material rewards is rapidly destroying their usefulness as incentives and managerial tools.”

Yet, in industries such as manufacturing, monetary rewards still seem to be what employees demand from their employer.  Many employees will leave their jobs for as little as 25c per hour more.  This trend, however, is symptomatic of an underlying, deeper dissatisfaction than that of money.

A major cause for employee dissatisfaction is that they do not feel valued, and a close secondary reason is that they don’t know what is going on in the company.  “But we do communicate!” management fervently claims.  One has to ask: “What do you tell them?”  Posting financial statements and other company information on a notice board is not communication.  Most employees don’t spend time reading notice boards, and cannot interpret financial information.  A study done by a major university recently reveals that out of 1010 adults tested and 1085 high school students, 49% of adults and 66% of the students failed a test on basic economics. 

So, how can we communicate effectively and how do we show we value our employees?  Start by looking at yourself and other managers in your organization.  Do you make a point of being accessible?  Do you make it a point to “catch people doing something right”, or is the only time you talk to an employee when they mess up?  Managers have fewer ways today to shape people’s behavior - coercive and authoritarian behavior is no longer an option.  To be effective, managers must create supportive work environments that can influence desired outcomes and behaviors.

Trust is an important factor, and often an event, such as a development program for the whole organization, is needed to start the trust building process.  Time and money spent on the right program has proven an excellent investment for major manufacturers such as Toyota.  (See Together for Prosperity on our website).

Some further actions required to get employees to want to perform their best, are to open channels of communication, and encourage suggestions from employees.  However, this might not work if trust has not been established first.  Employees have traditionally been conditioned to be mistrustful when asked for their input, something that will change if the correct environment has been established.  I have personally had the opportunity to witness companies saving literally thousands of dollars in production costs per day by implementing employee suggestions.

So why bother with all this?  Would it not just be easier to keep doing what we’ve always done?  The fact is that it only takes a little effort on the part of management once the scene is set in order to receive huge returns in efficiency, productivity, involvement and loyalty of employees.  It is up to you - you are the one who holds the key to unlocking the vast well of energy that drives the success of your organization.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.