In the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts, two rival copy shops competed for many years. One was a Kinko's store, part of a successful nationwide chain. The other, a small, undercapitalized shop organized as a collective and run by a group of young people dedicated to creating a better work experience for themselves and a better alternative for customers. This upstart called itself Collective Copies, and operated out of an inexpensive second-floor space, in contrast to the prominent ground-floor retail store occupied by Kinko's Copies. And Collective Copies always seemed to have old and inefficient machines compared to the modern technology showcased at Kinko's. When I first saw the two stores, I was pretty confident the local upstart would be gone within a few years. I'd seen that story played out too many times to expect a miracle.

I was wrong. Somehow Collective Copies kept winning more customers. It gradually improved its equipment and bootstrapped its way into a better ground-floor space. And, over time, the Kinko's seemed to lose momentum. Until one day it's windows were papered over and its machines gone.

The local upstart had won. The major chain store had been forced to close. What happened?

A financial analysis doesn't explain the result. Because Kinko's had distinct cost advantages. It hired minimum-wage employees whereas the owner-operators of Collective Copies expected to pay themselves reasonable wages. And the chain presumably could negotiate better deals with equipment and paper suppliers because of its size. All else being equal, big chain stores always eat local competitors for lunch.

But all else wasn't equal. The employees of Collective Copies seemed to be more motivated and enthusiastic. Year after year, they kept trying new ideas, offering new services, and winning new accounts. They had a can-do attitude that made it easy to work with them. They made sure customers got what they needed when they needed it. In short, they seemed to be more motivated to succeed than their better-financed competitor. And in the long run, motivation made all the difference. It always does.

In this course, we'll look at the hidden power of employee motivation and learn how to harness it to make your people perform better and to improve your bottom line. But before we go on to the first session of the course, I want to point out that this course is not a standard of MBA programs. In fact, there is no course on employee motivation in the core curriculum of any business school as far as I have been able to determine. And that is a very interesting thing. If motivation can make all the difference, why isn't it a main focus of study for future managers and entrepreneurs? Well, it's because of our long tradition of rational management. It concentrates on the "hard" side of management, not the "soft" side. And your people are definitely on the soft side.

To date, employee motivation hasn't been easily reducible to formulas you can crunch on your pocket calculator. It's the "soft stuff" that successful executives and entrepreneurs learn or know instinctively, but that business schools have not yet bottled up very successfully. That's okay, of course. Sometimes we have to go well beyond the B-school campus to learn what we need to know about how to succeed in business!

In the following sessions, I'll lead you through a practical, real-world approach in which you raise employee motivation levels through a simple, four-step process. Each session corresponds to one of the steps in the motivation process. And if you want to get and keep high motivation levels, you simply need to be working with this process on a regular basis. See you in the first session!
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Building Employee Motivation

Most people think about motivation as a matter of applying the right motivators to "make their people" do what they should. People don't achieve high levels of performance and motivation until they are aligned with the right opportunities that permit them to get engaged in challenging, inherently interesting work. And because we aren't traditionally very good at creating those motivating opportunities for employees, there is a far greater motivation problem in the workplace than any anyone likes to admit.

One reason—the biggest reason—why most managers have a motivatio problem is that our conventional thinking about motivation is all wrong. We ignore much of our employee's potential and allow them to operate near the bottom of the motivation curve. And we fail to appreciate that people are ready and willing to self-motivate—but only when faed with real personal threats or opportunities. Instead of working toward the top of the motivation curve, most of us fool around with messy low-powered external motivators that don't move employees far from the bottom of the curve.

You know you have a motivation problem if:

• You have to keep an eye on your people to make sure theey actually do their work.

• Your people don't seem to care enough to perfect their skills and learn from their mistakes.

• You are the only one who takes serious problems seriously.

• You have the unpleasant feeling that most of your people think they deserve good pay and promotions just for showing up and doing the minimum.

• Your people are cynical about most of the incentives your orgnization offers and seem to "go along" with the latest initiatives and programs just to "keep management happy".

One reason that employees are generally operating at the unproductive bottom of the motivation curve is that we don't bother to measure motivation. How many businesses track revenues? How many track motivation? And yet we know that otivation drives revenues and profits, so it seems as if we are failing to track an absolutely vital measurement. The Job Motivation Level Inventory measures motivation levels by looking at seven key components or indicators of job motivation level.

I strongly advise you to make occasional formal measurement of job motivation levels by filling in the Job Motivation Level Inventory if you really want to compare the levels in different units of the organization. You'll have to have employees fill in their own version of the inventory instead of relying on management judgments.

Surcon International Inc., is an organizational research consulting practice based in Chicago. It specializes in developing custom employee, manageemnt, and customer surveys to help improve performance or bring about positive change. I was pleased that Richard Petronio, President and CEO, agreed to contribute some of his firm's findings to this book. Mr. Petronio reports that most managers are greatly surprised by the powerful link from employee attitudes to company profits.

Surcon surveyed the employees in two plants within the same company and found that one plant fit the profile of participating management, the other of autocratic management. In the first plan, fairness, concern, and consideration scores were about 20 to 50 percent higher than the seconf plant. As a result, in the first plan, employee motivation scores were 35 to 40 percent higher than in the second plant.

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The Motivation Process

People have a very natural and healthy urge to accomplish things, both in the short term and in the long term. As a result, they wish to grow and develop so they are able to accomplish more and more as time goes by. Sometimes their desires seem to be at odds with the goals of the organization, as when employees desire raises and promotions and companies want to minimize payroll costs. But you can't expect the same people to do the same work the same way, year after year, and still have a healthy, motivated work force. Everyone needs opportunities to grow.

The things people usually work with in their efforts to motivate employees, including salaries, were not as important. They didn't explain as much of the variation in people's motivation.

At the top of the list are achievement and recognition for that achievement. Employees find that the oppportunity to achieve something important makes their work meaningful. And that is the most motivating thing of all. The need for meaning in work is what drives some people to seek adventure careers, and so many others to feel trapped in their jobs and to fantasize about doing something more exciting.

Nobody goes to work to work. They go to work to accomplish something they can feel proud of.
Yet most jobs are built around the lower-impact factors from Herzberg's list. Based on his findings, Herzberg developed the concept of job enrichment to increase motivation. It involves redesigning work to create more opportunities for accomplishment and recognition.

You enrich jobs, according to his theory, by "vertical job loading", which uses seven different priciples to enrich an employee's job. I'm going to review and explain briefly each of them because they are such powerful motivational tools.

Principle: Remove some control while retaining accountability.
For example, you might stop tracking certain measures of the employee's performance, but to make sure s/he is still accountable, you could put the employee in charge of making the same measurements. This principle engages two strong motivators: personal achievement and responsibility.

Principle: Give the employee a complete, natural unit of work.
For example, you might redesign a line of workers who hand off work, organizing it into cells with teams of workers, and having each cell do a chunk of work that produced important component. This principle engages achievement, recognition, and responsibility.

Principle: Increase the accountability of individuals for their own work.
For example, you might switch from tracking a department's overall productivity to tracking the productivity of each individual in the department so each can be held accountable for his or her contribution to production. This principle engages responsibility and recognition.

Principle: Give employees more freedom to make sure they feel they have authority in their own work. For example, you might "put employees in charge of their own work" by asking them to submit plans for redesigning it in order to achieve quality or efficiency improvements. This principle engages the motivating power of achievement, recognition, and responsibility.

Principle: Make management information available to employees directly, not just their supervisors.
For example, you might try some of the new "open book management" techniques, like posting weekly financials and other management indicators on all the employee bulletin boards. This approch engages the motivation power of achievement, responsibility, and recognition.

Principle: Introduce new challenges by making tasks more complex and adding tasks.
For example, an employee who has been responsible only for answering incoming telephone calls could be put in charge of learning about the telephone system's various options and training other employees in how to use it better. This principle offers opportunities for achievement through growth and learning.

Principle: Encourage the development of expertise.
For example, you might assign people specialized tasks. The prior example, in which a telephone operator becomes the expert on the phone system, also illustrates this principle. It taps into the power of respinsibility, growth, and learning.

When you use one or more of these principles to alter an employee's job, even in small, easy-to-do ways, you are increasing the motivating power of that job. And what these principles have in common is that they lead to new opportunities to develop and grow.
They encourage employee development.

In "horizontal job loading", you just pile up more of the same kind of work on the employee's desk or back. And that's not at all motivating because it does not provide any development opportunities.

Both approaches often lead to more work, but more work doesn't seem bad when it is the result of more opportunity. So the distinction is critical. Back to top


Challenge & Motivation

One reason why you may need more ammunition in your quiver in order to make motivation work is that more and more managers are trying to make employees (including yours) feel bad about their work. Life in many workplaces is increasingly like a Dilbert cartoon. And many managers, including ones who view you as a competitor for the next big promotion, want to make your people miserable and are eager to see you fail. So someone else may actually be putting a sincere effort into making your people feel like sh*t.

I'm not kidding! if you don't believe me, you are pleasantly naive. But you need to know what's going on out there in the increasingly Machiavellian world of cut-throat management. Here's some interesting advice from Blaine Pardoe, a successful consultant and author who says it's now a "hypercompetitive workplace." The following is a quote from his book, Cubicle Warfare:

Sabotage happens more often than people will admit. Given the advances in technology there are numerous ways to slow up progress, screw up meetings, or simply make projects a living hell for those working on them.

Feeling good is powerful medicine, but in today's workplaces it often requires you and your people to swim against the current. The art of finding out how someone really feels or what s/he really thinks is the art of open question. Open questions get the other person talking while you listen and encourage him or her to talk. Employees with a truly bad attitude provide another form of sabotage that is extremely destructive to your motivational initiative even thought they don't mean to. First, don't focus on what they say. They are so used to forecasting gloom and doom that they always do. Focus instead on what they do. Then draw to your own conclusions about how they are doing and how their projects are going. If in your judgment things are pretty good, then tell them that. Don't ask them, tell them. They are wrong, you are right. And whatever you do, don't forget that nobody can fault you for being sympathetic and genuine in your concern for your employees. Or for believing in them and emphasizing their strengths instead of their weakenesses. Fortunately, you can and do have a large impact on how your employees feel. If you take ownership of the motivation problem, it will lead you to the realization that your own behavior can "fix" most employee problems by simply developing and sharing an optimistic view of their potential. Make them feel better, and they will be more motivated. And you will know you are accomplishing this important goal if you keep track of their emotional frame. You need to begin keeping track of the employee score.
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Feelings & Motivation

Here are few interesting facts from classic psychological studies that highlights the importance of emotional state:

• Hopefulness is a better predictor of college grades than SAT scores.
• Optimistic athletes win more medals.
• And optimistic athletes are especially good at coming back from disappointment to win anyway.

As these results illustrate so powerfully, feelings drive motivation by determining which path employee take. Get them started on the right path, the path based on optimism and hopefulness, and your motivation efforts move them toward ever higher levels of performance.

So how do you know when you have them going in the right direction? Is it just random chance? No, thank goodness. It's actually quite simple. The Figure below shows how feelings drive performance. It shows two paths, and it shows how emotional frame of mind determines which path employees take in reponse to your efforts to motivate them.