Don’t try to Motivate your team, Employee Engagement is what matters: So What (Part 2)

In the previous blog I discussed why we should forget trying to motivate staff and instead focus on employee engagement. Let’s now have a look at why this is important.

SO WHAT?

In approaching this theme, we have to first reflect on what Paul Rogers would normally ask “So, what?”

The answer to this question relies on a simple logical sequence:

Employee Engagement –> Trust –> Effective Work –> Contribution –> Customer Success –> Perpetuation of the Organisation

A) EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT BUILDS TRUST.

Trust is a basic ingredient of any positive relationship. If Trust is missing then teamwork does not exist. This is because cooperation and daily interaction easily deteriorates into arguments and conflict which is destructive for the morale of a team and diverts their attention from the real targets.

Hence, the existence of Trust is the building stone for the team members doing effective work and contributing to the team.

B) EFFECTIVE WORK MEANS FOCUS IN PERPETUATING THE ORGANISATION

As I will discuss in a future blog post, employee contribution is a key element to achieve Customer Success.

This seems self-evident i.e unless employees truly care and try to excel in the delivery of their work and the advancement of the Organisation’s vision and targets (provided of course that the Organisation’s positioning is rightly adjusted), the Organisation will not succeed in its goals and hence, its customers will be less likely to be successful in theirs.

On a broader scale, Drucker’s vision takes a more existentialist view on what an organisation is there for:

An “Organization is, to a large extent, a means of over-coming the limitations mortality sets to what any one man can contribute. An organization that is not capable of perpetuating itself has failed…….. An organization which just perpetuates today’s level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt. And since the one and only thing certain in human affairs is change, it will not be capable of survival in a changed tomorrow.” Peter Drucker from The Effective Executive.

So, for Drucker the organisation is a means for individuals to make a lasting contribution to the world.

From that perspective it is not only a necessity for an organisation to put in place a framework that ensures employee engagement so that employees can maximise their contributions and thus, secure the organisation remains relevant and profitable in this fast-paced world. But a responsibility to secure a framework that allows its employees and in extension itself to maximise its contribution to society overall.

In essence, looking at the grander picture i.e. that the Organisation is the lever for expression and progress in modern society or not, one thing is for sure: the success of the organizational goals is heavily reliant on employee engagement and contribution.

In my next blog post I will discuss some practical ways to achieve this.

[Image credit: 123rf.com]

Don’t try to Motivate your team, Employee Engagement is what matters: What and Why (Part 1)

I just want to make something clear. For what matters most, nobody can motivate you but yourself.

Employers, Managers, Team Leaders, Supervisors have the responsibility to engage employees. They couldn’t motivate them even if they wanted to.

Employee engagement means that Managers are responsible for creating the opportunities and the framework within which the employees can create, thrive and eventually succeed.

Motivation is something that comes within.

This outlook brings a new meaning to the interview question:

Are you self-motivated?

It makes it maybe the most important question one needs to pay attention to!

It also bring another perspective to the excellent motto from Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne of Manager Tools, that:

“Hiring is the most important activity that a manager does”.

So, why employee engagement is so important and how can we apply this concept and reap the benefits? 

A NECESSARY CAVEAT

The caveat is simple. More pay, perks and bonuses (carrots and sticks) may not be as effective as we may think in engaging and “motivating” people but if an organisation gets them wrong they can surely become de-motivators.

As Daniel Pink puts it in his excellent book DRIVE:

“Of course, the starting point for any discussion of motivation in the workplace is a simple fact of life: People have to earn a living. Salary, contract payments, some benefits, a few perks are what I call baseline rewards. If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. …..You’ll get very little motivation at all”.

WHY NOT MOTIVATION

Provided that the caveat condition is satisfied, why the use of extrinsic means (pay, perks, rewards or punishments) does not work for what matters most? Let’s look at the research:

Quoting from the book Drive by Daniel Pink:

“Researchers such as Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments both carrots and sticks can work nicely for algorithmic [routine] tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic [non-routine, creative] ones“.

As I discussed previously here, been innovative as an individual or an organisation is a key for remaining relevant and successful in the future.

So, the successful delivery of knowledge work (as Drucker calls blue collar work) which is prevalent in the Western World, will rely largely on heuristic [non-routine] tasks i.e. innovation and non linear thinking.

Therefore, the focus is on non-routine knowledge work that is harder to be outsourced and hence, will remain the primary aspect of job growth in the developed World.

Research from McKinsey detail that routine (labour intensive) work accounts for 30% job growth versus non-routine work (knowledge intensive) job growth of  70% (details for US market). I believe that in Australia it may account for even more than70% but I am not aware of any specific research results yet.

As we saw from the research, extrinsic motivation (carrots and sticks) do not stimulate the non-routine kind of work. But this depends on what Amabile calls:

the “intrinsic motivation principle of creativity”

Intrinsic motivation (self-motivation) can be stimulated by employee engagement.

Quite simply, the traditional motivation methods (carrots and sticks) do not work for the work that matters most.

In the 2nd part of the blog I discuss the So What aspect of employee engagement and on the 3rd part I will also provide some practical tips of how to to stimulate it within the workplace.