Employer paid health insurance, dental, tuition reimbursement, onsite daycare, commuter benefits, fair salary, bonuses, take your kids to work day, summer hours, pizza on holidays, margaritas on Cinco de Mayo……and now these and more delivered “covid style”.
What more do they want????
Well, how much more will you give?
I was facilitating a program for HR practitioners and one woman was simply exasperated. As a generalist, she just wanted happy employees. That’s it. If she could have one thing that would make the biggest positive difference in her work, it was to have happy employees.
She was surprised when I suggested that she may have given them too much.
When we began an exercise to generate the options she had available to achieve that goal, she stopped and said “I need to start by listing all the things we already do for them”. She then listed for the group the litany of benefits and concessions the company had given employees in an effort to increase satisfaction and motivation. She was surprised when I suggested that she may have given them too much.
Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation
For decades we’ve been using a behavioral psychology model of work reward: salary, benefits, praise, traditional performance management – which all have their place for sure. But then we wonder why we have such entitled employees. It’s because we’ve trained them to be so.
Our efforts have been so focused on what we can give or take from employees to make the company goals and finances balance out, that we’ve created a new currency of sorts: one consisting of benefits, flexibility, environment – whatever it takes, really – to assign value to performance. Inadvertently, by using this approach, we assign a value to the work itself: one that is inversely proportional to that of the performance.
Fostering intrinsic motivation
Recent research supports a shift away from an extrinsic focus and gives us new options for developing intrinsic motivation and engagement. Models and programs coming out of the neuroscience and neuropsychology fields will be transformative for organizations and individuals alike and will translate to exciting new techniques for recruiting, selection, teambuilding, retention, productivity and more.
Monsters? Not really.
It’s about motivation.
Learn more about Uncommon Employee Engagement, Uncommon Strategic Leadership, Workforce Efficacy™and Strategic Self-care and join the conversation.