Motivating & Engaging Employees

5 Key excerpts on "Motivating & Engaging Employees"

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  eBook - ePub

  75 Ways for Managers to Hire, Develop, and Keep Great Employees

  • Paul Falcone(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • AMACOM

    (Publisher)

  Organizational reward systems—employee of the month, anniversary awards, “applause” bulletin boards, “Wall of Fame” photos, and on-the-spot special recognition awards—are great. But this chapter’s focus has gone beyond those activities and programs to address a soft skill that’s arguably one of the most critical drivers of business success—recognition of employees at the individual level, which is an integral part of your organizational strategy.

  A motivational work environment rests upon: • Developing open and honest relationships through communication • Building a positive team spirit • Sustaining a continued focus on career growth and development

  As such, it recognizes that the single most important variable in employee performance and productivity hinges on the quality of the relationship between employees and their supervisors. Further, workplace wisdom suggests that besides supporting their families, work allows employees an opportunity to make a difference. They want to understand how they fit in with the company’s vision and how they can contribute.

  On a more practical basis, therefore, placing your focus on employee engagement over customer satisfaction will likely yield happier, more loyal customers. That’s why organizations often create mission statements that reverse the traditional order of placing employees at the bottom of the pecking order (i.e., behind customers, products, and shareholders). Organizations realize that their most important assets are their employees. To generate excellent customer service strategies, organizations need motivated employees who deliver the customer experience.

  Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies and author of Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down, writes that your employees are the gateway to customer satisfaction, and if they aren’t happy, the customer isn’t going to be happy. Richard Branson, CEO

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  Valuing People To Create Value: An Innovative Approach To Leveraging Motivation At Work

  An Innovative Approach to Leveraging Motivation at Work

  • Herve Mathe, Xavier Pavie, Marwyn O'keeffe(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • World Scientific

    (Publisher)

  Employees that feel like an important and integral part of the company strategy tend to be more motivated to contribute in a positive way to company success. Fostering connection in the workplace can be leveraged through the levers of Vision & Mission , Culture & Shared Values , and Interpersonal Relationships . 148 Work: Thank God it’s Monday (9 January 2005). Time. 149 Herzberg, F (1987). One more time — How do you motivate employees? Harvard Business Review , 65(5), 109–112. 150 Along with benefits and pay, employees seek friends on the job (20 February 2002). Wall Street Journal . Leveraging Motivation in the Organisation Today 157 5.6.1. Vision and Mission ‘ To enlist people in a vision, leaders must know their con-stituents as well as their cultures and languages. It is not just connecting different sets of people into one, but rather connecting people with a shared vision who have a strong relationship with each other .’ Frank Mulhern The connection that employees feel with the organisation influences their commitment and willingness to strive collectively for achieving company’s objectives. The execution of vision and mission is strong when people understand the objectives of the company, know where the organisation is headed and feel an important part of it. When employees feel a sense of ownership and connection with the company, and when they care about the future of the organisation, they become more invested in their individual roles and the company’s performance. Definition of Vision and Mission : A company’s core purpose is that all employees, activities and processes collectively contribute to the achievement of organisational goals. Vision can be defined as the long-term view of what an organisation is striving to become. The mission of the company articulates the vision and sets a roadmap for the future. 158 Valuing People to Create Value A vision reflects a firm’s fundamental beliefs, experiences, shared values, future goals and opportunities.

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  The Talent Powered Organization

  Strategies for Globalization, Talent Management and High Performance

  • Peter Cheese, Robert J Thomas, Elizabeth Craig(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Kogan Page

    (Publisher)

  ᔢ Dedication: highly engaged employees are dedicated to their work because they find it meaningful and fulfilling. Through their work they become better people in their own eyes. Such behaviours are readily observable. An engaged workforce normally looks happier and busier. And as you would expect, research has confirmed that engaged employees have higher job satisfaction, work harder and perform better in their jobs than their less engaged colleagues. They have lower absenteeism and greater job loyalty. They have better relationships at work and build better teams. They are more likely to meet their organization’s standards of behaviour and service to its customers. In summary, engagement is a combination of heart and mind. It is a collective result of complex factors such as people’s sense of identity and belonging, feeling valued and their emotional and intellectual connection with colleagues, and more extrinsic factors such as satis-faction in work content and the support they get to perform effec-tively. At the high end, engagement represents the degree to which they are aligned, confident and committed to achieving higher performance, and motivated to apply additional discretionary effort to their work; and at the low end, it manifests itself in low levels of responsiveness and energy, and high absenteeism. An important and closely related concept to engagement is align-ment: the degree to which employees understand and identify with their organization’s goals, the linkage to their own objectives and abilities, and how they direct their energies to achieving them. Engagement l 155 Without alignment, it is easy to see how even employees’ positive engagement could be misdirected and wasted within an organization, but of itself it is also an important factor in building engagement.

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  Industrial/Organizational Psychology

  An Applied Approach

  • Michael Aamodt(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  I also work with upper management to show them how their behaviors and decisions affect individuals at the lower levels of the organization. It is critical to have strong business relationships at this level in order to obtain acceptance of whatever intervention is nec-essary to improve performance. These relationships are essential to drive the changes throughout the organization. One of the hottest topics around employee motivation in many organizations today is the concept of employee engagement. More and more organizations are replacing their annual employee satisfaction survey and implementing employee engagement metrics. There are a variety of engagement definitions, but most encompass the degree to which employees commit to something (e.g., job responsibility) or someone (e.g., the manager) in their organization and/or how hard they will work and how long they will stay as a result of their commitment. With more attention being paid to these results, there are more opportunities to apply them within management/leadership development and team effectiveness programs. It also broadens the scope and style of interventions to a much more systemic view of motivation throughout an entire organization. Throughout my career, I have worked in a variety of companies ranging from Fortune 500 to small start-up organizations. With most small to midsize organizations, middle management is the most ignored population when it comes to employee development opportunities. Unfortunately, they are the most critical group because they are the key link to implementing upper management’s strategic plan. When training managers, it is critical to find ways to motivate individuals to use new techniques and skills to improve their performance. Training on any new skill or behavior is a chal-lenge, especially when it provides a major change to the way individuals have performed for long periods of time.

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  Strategic Human Resource Management in the Public Arena

  A Managerial Perspective

  • John Cunningham(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  185 Developing and Engaging Employees IV Part In Chapter 4, we suggested that one way to improve employee engagement and respond to employees’ public sector motivation is to enrich their work so that it is intrinsically motivating and engaging. In the next five chapters, we illustrate strategic objectives for developing and engaging employees by focusing their career development, developing training and development programmes to enhance their compe-tencies, improve their health and well-being and develop a positive labour relations climate. 187 9 Encouraging Individually Directed Career Development CHAPTER OBJECTIVES (COs) After reading this chapter, you will be able to implement the following objectives: CO 1: Examine the new boundary-less career where employees have no set career path. CO 2: Compare organizational and individually directed career development. CO 3: Apply a career development planning perspective for a boundary-less career. A DRIVING ISSUE FOCUSING MANAGERIAL ACTION: RECOGNIZING HOW VOCATIONAL PREFERENCES SHAPE HOW PEOPLE FIT According to Richard Nelson Bolles, author of What Color Is Your Parachute? , individuals often make poor career choices because they rely too much on perceived competencies. 1 They became lawyers because of the profession’s status and their passion for social justice issues. Unfortunately, when they began working as a lawyer, they found that much of their paid work involved drafting letters, prepar-ing wills and assisting unemployed workers obtain unemployment benefits.

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