Setting Up An Employee Motivation Program

It is standard practice for a new manager to develop an employee motivation program, or for an experienced manager to reevaluate their existing program to see if there are areas in which it can be improved. I applaud these efforts, but I'm also about to offer a somewhat controversial suggestion later within this article.

First let's take a quick look at the standard elements that make up an employee motivation program:

  • Regular communication sessions
  • Regular employee evaluations (often considered part of the aforementioned communication sessions)
  • Workplace assessments – would you be happy if you were in your employees' shoes? If not, it's time to fix something!

I won't discuss employee evaluations in this article because we have others that address this issue such as:

Instead, I would like to touch upon the topic of setting up regular communication sessions as part of an employee motivation program. My advice? Don't do it!

Now it's not that communication sessions are a bad thing – in fact I find such sessions essential for maintaining employee morale and putting together an employee motivation program. It's the regular part of "regular communication sessions" that I dislike.

As managers many of us tend to have a linear mindset. We see goals that must be achieved and try to set up structured, disciplined and speedy ways of meeting those goals. I can't fault this since many people have become quite successful with such a structured mentality, but I think it's far better suited to numbers and money management than it is to people.

You cannot think of your employees as part of a cog in your grand business machine. Each of them has separate feelings, agendas, motives and desires, but one common desire that all humans share is the desire to feel wanted. To feel special. We don't want to feel like just another cog, no matter how menial our work may truly be.

Your goal as a manager is to tap into this desire and use it to your advantage, and one of the best ways to do so is to throw out linear communication sessions and introduce spontaneous friendly chats. Most employees will not be as impressed with regular Friday 1:00 meetings as they will be with unexpected greetings or chat sessions.

If an employee knows they will meet with you every single Friday at 1:00, it becomes less like a communication session and more as an obligation that must be met by both parties. He will feel that you're holding them simply because it's your job, and as such no matter how sincere your efforts there will almost always be a small degree of doubt or skepticism imbedded into your employee's mind. He will feel your regular sessions are just another of necessary "rules" that must be met in a cold, calculated corporate employee motivation program.

On the other hand what would happen if you chopped the regular scheduled sessions from once a week to once a month? (And the monthly meeting would be a formality to provide the illusion that the meeting is indeed corporate policy.) Well, your employee would still be unimpressed with the monthly session, but here's where the powerful twist comes in.

Although you will meet with your employee officially once a month, and you'll both view it as a standard company policy/procedure (even though you know better), in reality you will still meet with your employees regularly. The meetings will just be off-the-cuff, spontaneous sessions that you initiate seemingly at whim. You will also structure those spontaneous sessions more as a greeting than an official manager-employee chat.

Suddenly your sessions take a whole new context, don't they? Your employee will feel your praise (or if necessary, criticism) is more sincere and/or justified. Your words won't feel like part of a ritual, but rather as coming from the heart.

Think of it like this: which gift is more special, a Christmas gift or a gift a loved one surprises you with out of the blue? Sure, we enjoy both, but most reading this will acknowledge that pleasant surprises out of the blue are far more heartwarming! We all expect gifts for Christmas, but it's when we least expect them that they seem less like a ritual and more like a sincere sentiment.

When you are setting up your employee motivation program do write frequent communication sessions into the plan, but don't make all the sessions scheduled affairs. Tap into human nature by keeping your employees off guard (in a good way, of course) and making your sessions seem unplanned and sincere.