What gets you up on a Monday morning?
This blog was written by Bradley Rutty, our fantastic and talented work experience student!
I’m sure that we have all felt tired and bored at some point in our work place.
Motivation in a business is surly an obvious way to create a healthier working environment that will better the business, but to many companies it is disregarded. But motivating a workforce is not always the easiest task to carry out. Some of the time it involves spending time and money. In the long run is it worth it?
I have come across an old motivational theorist, Frederick Taylor.
Taylor believed that employees are mainly motivated by pay. To an extent I feel this is true. When looking for jobs did you try your hardest to get the jobs with the highest pay?
If you are one of the few whom didn’t I believe most people do. Taylor trained staff in one area and paid them for the amount of work they did i.e. a pound for each pot you make. This is meant to motivate staff to make more pots, which will hopefully increase productivity. But as you can imagine doing the same task over and again would end up becoming monotonous and boring leading to de-motivation.
One of the most important things to remember when it comes to motivation is that even small things like having brief team meetings to take a glimpse at what everyone is doing or discussing plans with the whole team to make sure every knows what is going on in the business will make people feel more secure and safe within a business. And more importantly like today when the savior, who is the coffee deliveryman arrives with a new supply of coffee it suddenly motivates the employees!
When it comes to rewarding people with money it can have the opposite effect, i.e. the employee who works best throughout the month receives an extra 5% of the salary on top. You may ask how does this not motivate? It goes against what the majority of people think. But people may think that they performed at the same level but did not get notice, which will de-motivate.
Disagreeing with Taylor other things motivate us. Autonomy, if you are in control of what you are doing you will find it more motivating as it is your responsibility therefore you want to do well. Mastery, the want to better yourself at what you do will motivate you to try to avoid mistakes. It is clearly described in this video, which also describes the science behind how we are all actually motivated!