When we try to visualize the term Employee-Motivation, we come across various options like “ Increase in salary every year, Bonus, sponsored trip…. and so on”. But can we actually motivate a person? You actually cannot motivate anyone as each of us are self-motivated. You can only inspire the same.
What is Motivation?
Motivation is just a feeling. We made it very important to our discussions and with lots of theories but forgot that the fact remains the same – Motivation is a feeling just like other feelings. And like other feelings, you don’t become motivated – You feel Motivated.
While Talking About Employee Motivation, it’s the feeling of the employee. Everyone has different factors of motivation like money, status, power, responsibility and so on but all those are normally available in a Job. The only difference about this feeling is that this feeling is related to you, the organization, the culture, the environment and much more. If we club together everything, we can say, its the Job Attitude which actually affects the Employee Motivation.
What is Attitude?
Before going ahead, let’s understand the meaning of Attitude. The word attitude has actually three components that move simultaneously. The first one, being Sense which actually creates our pathway to understand something or believing something.
The second one is our Feeling, which is generated by our sense and believe and the third one is Action which is the behavior resulted out of the sense and feeling.
These components are actually inseparable and are closely related to each other and highly dynamic. And it happens so fast that it’s almost impossible to understand which component affected what.
What Is Job Attitude?
When we use the word Job Attitude, we are actually describing all work-related attitudes. It’s a combination of all the positive and negative beliefs, evaluations and feelings an employee holds about the work, work environment, and the Organization. And Job Attitude is the biggest driver in generating Employee Motivation. Some of the critical factors which affect the Job Attitude are:
Job Satisfaction – The satisfaction level of an employee on the job he or she is doing. The more satisfied one is, the more positive feeling the employee generates.
Job Involvement – The easiest way to understand Job Involvement is when the employee feels that the extent of performance in a job is actually the measure of his or her self-worth. Hence job involvement includes the psychological involvement, competency levels, meaningfulness of the job, the work environment and much more.
Organization Trust – It’s the extent to which an employee trusts the organization. This factor is mainly influenced by the manager as trust comes out of organization clarity, the opportunity to contribute, opportunity to grow, mutual respect, the way employees are treated, the extent of organizational support and much more. The more trust the employee believes, the more positive feeling is generated.
Employee Engagement – While employee engagement is nowadays a trending topic, I thought of writing the way I understand the engagement of an employee. Highly Engaged,
Engaged, Disengaged, Highly Disengaged employees have one thing in common – They all put the time to their works. But the difference lies in their passion for work, their energy at work, their commitment to work and their level of connecting with the organization.
Who can actually influence the employee job satisfaction resulting in inspiring Employee Motivation?
While there are lots of surveys available to measure such feelings but the feeling can be better understood than measured. Take the case of any relationship that you have. Do you understand the feeling of those relations or you measure those feelings? For example, I have never conducted any survey to measure the feeling of relations with my parents, my girlfriend or anyone in that case. But, when it comes to employees, we start measuring it.
Probably, we will have a logic coming to our mind that it’s impossible for any organization to feel all the employees and that’s why such surveys are done. But, if it’s so, then why there is the concept of breaking down the organization into departments, functions, regions, and teams and appointing various levels of managers? It’s done so that small teams of employees can be taken care of by one person responsible and that way, the ladder should go up so that the entire organization is taken care of. The survey can be done one time to understand at an organization level, which are the factors to be improved overall but, the manager contributes the most important role when it comes to Employee Motivation. And if the manager cannot understand the feeling of their employees, probably it’s time to look into the relationship skills before we look at the performance graph, goal sheets, and other things.
“| Minimalist| Strategizer| Explorer| Enjoys Silence| – That’s what I am & What I do |” – That’s how Shouvik defines himself. An avid photographer, a Raghu Rai enthusiast, who also eats, sleeps and dreams the Vision of Steve Jobs, Shouvik has given birth to The HR Monks in a vision to change lives.
Greatly influenced by the passion of service of Mother Teresa and Karmayoga of Swami Vivekananda, he dreams of building an organization of the HR family, who will not only serve the nation by creating India a happy work-home but also creating a monks team who takes work as worship.
In his personal life, he is touched by Dr. Wayne Dyer who believes in a shift.
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