If You Were a Manager How Would You Motivate Your Employees Free Essays

What motivates employees? Motivation is the inner power or energy that pushes toward acting, performing actions and achieving. Motivation has much to do with desire and ambition, and if they are absent, motivation is absent too. The topic of motivating employees is extremely important to managers and supervisors. We will write a custom essay sample on If You Were a Manager How Would You Motivate Your Employees or any similar topic only for you Order Now Motivation strengthens the ambition, increases initiative and gives direction, courage, energy and the persistence to follow one’s goals. A motivated person takes action and does whatever it needs to achieve his/her goals.Motivation becomes strong when you have a vision, a clear mental image of what you want to achieve, and also a strong desire to materialize it. In this situation motivation awakens and pushes you forward, towards taking action and making the vision a reality. A great place to start learning about motivation is to start understanding your own motivations. The key to helping motivate your employees is to understand what motivates them. Each person is motivated by different things and in different ways.Whatever steps you take to support the motivation of your employees, they should first include finding out what it is that really motivates each of your employees. You can find this out by asking them, listening to them and observing them. A positive motivation improves productivity, quality and service and it helps people to gain a positive perspective, create the power to change, it build self-esteem, capability and manage their own development and help others with theirs too. To have successful business managers must keep motivation standards amongst their employees at a high level.The following specific steps can help you go a long way toward supporting your employees to motivate themselves in your organization: 1. Salaries: some people work for personal fulfilment, others work for love of what they do. Others work to accomplish goals and to feel as if they are contributing to something larger than themselves. The bottom line is that we all work for money. A good salary every month keeps employees happy, so that they can satisfy their basic needs like food, clothing and shelter.So managers should pay sufficient amount of salary and also be able to increase that amounts on a yearly basis too. 2. Safety at work and good work environment: working conditions are very important to employees because they influence the way they feel about the place they work in. Employees should work in humane conditions so they can feel good and comfortable. In this way they can apply themselves better to the work they are asked to do and therefore they can achieve more. It is also equally important that employees feel to be safe and protected in a good, modern office building, rather than an old one. . Offering training: one thing employee’s demand from the organisation, especially younger employees, is the opportunity to sharpen or add to their skills. Offering training as a perk for a job well done can be very beneficial. It makes them happy because they can learn more skills and they become more employable down the road. The type of training you can offer depends on the type of business you have, but it should certainly include computer courses as technology nowadays has developed so much that it makes business life easier. Such courses are more suited to today’s younger employees.Older employees may appreciate courses offering management skills, financial planning and so on. You can offer in house trainings or send your employees off-site. Or you can offer video and internet-based trainings. What matters is to design such a job related training programme that will not only be job related but also to develop personally the employee. 4. Recognition: Positive recognition is one of the mightiest of motivating factors at work. When employees accomplish what they have been asked to do at high standards, they feel the sense of achievements. Your recognition is appreciation for that achievement.I believe that most managers don’t give enough recognition to their employees because they don’t get enough themselves. By taking notice of an employee’s efforts and letting the employee know when he or she is doing an especially good job, you’ll reinforce that behaviour and the employee is likely to repeat and build on the traits you want to encourage. It is worth panting out that recognizing and rewarding an employee’s good work has little or no cost. This recognition and rewarding of excellent performance can take several forms like a gift, a new job title or a bonus. Also, after an employee has worked hard to complete a project or dealt with successfully an especially stressful situation, you might give to that employee an afternoon or a day off with full pay, of course. Verbal rewards are very important too. To receive a praise from managers makes the employees very happy and gives them the satisfaction that their work is recognised and appreciated. 5. Flexible hours and time offs: employees should provide, if their business activity allows it, flexible hours of work to employees.The number of working hours per day cannot change but the employee can choose after agreement with his manager the time he can start and finish his work. Furthermore, instead of paying the employees for extra hours they worked on, they can be granted time off. 6. Promotions: Another important factor that encourages the employees to work hard and diligently is to know that their efforts will be rewarded and will rise up in hierarchy in the organisation they work for. Therefore, employees expect that their performance will be evaluated objectively and that they will be promoted accordingly.Not all motivation theories apply to all employees. Nowadays, employees are very demanding and therefore depending on their perception of life they get influenced differently about what they expect from their employers. Having studied these theories I have isolated the following specific theories that I think they have real impact on today’s demanding employees. Foremost is the Two-Factor theory of Herzberg’s and sometimes also called motivation-hygiene theory that explain the two ways between the Extrinsic and Intrinsic. In the belief that an individual’s relation to work is basic and that one’s attitude toward work can very well determine success or failure. Certain characteristics tend to be consistently related to job satisfaction such as work itself, responsibility and achievement and others to job dissatisfaction such as company policies, salary, supervision and working conditions. Companies around the world are cutting back their financial-incentive programs, but few have used other ways of inspiring talent.Numerous studies have concluded that for people with satisfactory salaries, means some non-financial motivators are more effective than extra cash. For example, McKinsey Quarterly survey underscores the opportunity. The respondents view three managers with satisfactory salaries are more effective than cash bonuses or increased base pay by leadership attention and a chance to lead projects or task forces in order to â€Å"makes employees feel like they’re part of the com pany’s future. † As a sequence, this way making employees feel that their companies value them, take their wellbeing seriously and strive to create pportunities for career growth in order to go above and beyond expectations. The company has reframed the incentives issue by putting the focus on â€Å"recognition† instead of â€Å"reward† in order to inspire a more thoughtful discussion about what motivates people. This company associated with the work itself or to outcomes directly derived from it, such as promotional opportunities, opportunities for personal growth, recognition, responsibility and achievement. These are the characteristics that employees find intrinsically rewarding.Other general accepted theories nowadays are the Hierarchy of Needs of Maslow’s and similarly ERG theory of Clayton Alderfer’s that there are three groups of core needs such as existence, relatedness and growth. Several studies have supported ERG theory, but there is also evidence that it doesn’t work in some organizations. However, this theory represents a more valid version of the need hierarchy. For example, the hotels Ritz-Carlton engages its staff to increase employee satisfaction and i mprove customer service. The hotels offer food and residence for staff and every day, employees of every department in every Ritz-Carlton hotel around the world gather for a 15-minute staff meeting where they share â€Å"wow stories. † Managers encouraged speaking up during staff meetings and also they don’t focus on what employees have done wrong, but instead seek to help them improve on a given task as a result reinforces a customer service skill. Most important, it gives an employee â€Å"local fame. † Employees want to be recognized in front of their peers.Giving them public recognition is a powerful motivator. Furthermore, moods are contagious. Managers who walk around with a smile on their face and demonstrate passion for their jobs have an uplifting effect on others. The hierarchic theory is often represented as a pyramid, that unsatisfied needs motivate or that a satisfied need activates movement to a new need level. This company associated by safe and pleasant working conditions, public recognition and achievement in a work. Similarly, my strongly belief is that the most hotels using these theories.REFERENCEShttp://www. hpl. hp. com/news/2010/jan-mar/pdf/HPL_AnnualReport_2009_ScreenRes. pdfhttp://www. forbes. com/2010/04/07/motivating-employees-rewards-leadership-dewhurst. htmlhttp://managementhelp. org/guiding/motivate/basics. htm How to cite If You Were a Manager How Would You Motivate Your Employees, Papers