In harmony with Herzberg et al (1957) maintained that the lack of motivation may cause dissatisfaction, at worst, those employees become powerful negative influences in the workplace, spreading rumour, gossip and discontent amongst otherwise happy staff members. These are just some of the reasons why motivation should be important in an organization. It was thought that money helps to avoid dissatisfaction at work; however, money did not result in lasting satisfaction.
One of the studies by Kohn (1998) suggests t the financial incentives do not motivate people. “It becomes disturbingly clear that the more you use rewards to motivate people, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the rewards. ” In fact, money is not the key of success. Sometimes, it does not motivate all the employees and its influence over people can vary. In the like manner Pfeffer (1999) stated that the major problem with money is that life is not long. Therefore the influence of money is quite “overestimated”.
While many of these principles have been absorbed into modern day, Motivation of employees becomes a real challenge for organization as this crucial function of the HRM department depends on several factors that are interdependent. The money issue is likely to be important as it possible to work on some cases, but it may not achieve success for others employees in the same circumstances. Also it is very remarkable for the HRM department to keep in relation between organization results and the workers contribution.
A good option is to base the incentives on appropriate and elementary measurements so that the employees could make the correct connections and understand the relations and to be informed by the result of their value added to the organisation. All the incentives would be well-linked to the workers future demand. If not, that would mean that any such encouragement form HRM department could not be effective on the employee performance in the future. In order to motivate incentives, it should be easy to reach and the best alternative would choose them according to employee preferences.
“Suitable person in the suitable place” and to offer only what he or she can give back. There are other approaches like placing employees in jobs where their skills can shine and encourage the staff to be the best they can be; showing employees ways to contribute meaningfully to the organization, by providing “need to know” information, i. e. telling the truth; avoiding over involved with team work, and their specific domains.
Many corporate Employee Motivation Strategies assumed that people all respond to the same incentives. Most commonly money is used to improve motivation, staff retention. However, employee motivation is much more complicated than that. To identify what employees’ real needs is the essential of deciding which motivator is the most effective one. Simultaneously, formulating a criterion of performance measurement is necessary for rewarding system. Gofton (1998) believed that there are four major factors connected with the performance measurement.
They understand the target audience, effective communications, the commitment of senior management, and the recognition of achievement. It is recognised that some company use agency elaborate their employee motivation strategy and performance measurement programme. The first step in developing the programme is to know exactly how to measure what needs enhancing. The main new idea is that there are several ways to improve but if the organization wants to know what the employees think about the incentives or work, it needs to get feedback from them. During all the process the boss should be trusted.
This short summary shows some ideas as discussed before: Firstly, any program that is implemented must be in accordance with the employees and they should know that it exists and the way it works. The incentives should be something that the employees want to get, so the best way would be to talk with them to discover what they want. Secondly, about the idea of measuring the performance, everybody should understand it otherwise it will probable not work. Moreover, the employees should be able to see the possible connections between the performance and company’s results.
Organizations recently are concerned about the motivation of their employees, and how they solve this problem. It is known that a lot of companies that are in dependency with the sales team using trips as a possible choice because money means paying more taxes, so some workers might change their likes and dislikes. The choice for a trip as an incentive is becoming more popular in the last five years. From Writer’s perspective, although money plays an important role in the incentives systems, the company should still examine whose own situation carefully to choose the best motivation for employees based on their expectation from their jobs.
Conclusion
In this dynamic and highly competitive business environment, human capital remains a valuable asset in every organization. In fact, highly self-motivated, committed, ambitious employees can build a high performance organization and sustain that competitive advantage. However, when staffs feel lacking motivation, the effects can be dramatic: they lose enthusiasm for their work, make mistakes, being lack of initiative and energy, and lack of loyalty for their company, which leads to a high staff turnover. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to motivate staff.
Traditionally companies use financial bonuses or perks to encourage employees to give their best effort. However the key to an effective employee motivation strategy is to provide a range of incentives that will appeal to different personalities. While one individual may be highly money motivated another may find job satisfaction or creative opportunities are more powerful factors. In theory, the simplest and most intuitive approach to motivation is to satisfy an employee’s needs. The employer can choose the ‘right’ employee rewards for doing job and especially for doing job well.
Providing the ‘right’ rewards reinforces the employees’ actions thus causing the employees to repeat the actions to get the reward again. Realizing that each employee is motivated by different things, managers should always target their rewards carefully and individually. One employee may simply want a higher salary, another wants company pension, while a third person might prefer more non-essential training. The above approaches seem too idealistic. In reality, the problem is how to find what really motivates the staff. It is always being wrongly assumed that all the people are motivated by the same things.
And managers, on the other hand, like to use the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach which is convenient to them. That is why in many large corporations, although billions of dollars have been spent each year on money motivation, there is still a high staff turnover. In conclusion, employees are motivated by a whole range of factors: financial rewards, promotion, praise and acknowledgement, competition, job security, public recognition, and so on. Managers must take these separately and use them on their employees individually.
Further, the fundament of motivation is to balance people’s attitudes about work and life. What managers need to do is to make employees understand work is part of their lives and they should bring that passion into their daily works.
References
Thompson, P. and McHugh, D. , 1995. Work Organisation: A Critical Introduction. ed. 2nd. Macmillan Business 1 Glenn Livingston, president of New York consulting business association for Money Mind Studies, www. emporia. edu/ibed/jour/jou21shr/mlewis. htm
