Motivating people to work well is a very complex issue. Many managers believe that the only reason people go to work is for the money; it is true that money does play some part in motivating people; however, contemporary research highlights significant other reasons, which motivate people at work.
Decades of research and dozens of studies show repeatedly that while money can be a de-motivator, it is rarely a good motivator. Money always shows up as fourth or fifth on any list of motivational factors. Pay gets people to show up for work. However, pay doesn't get many to excel. More important is interesting, challenging, or meaningful work, recognition and appreciation, a sense of accomplishment, growth opportunities, and the like. However, the big problem is that managers have consistently listed money as the number one factor that they think motivates people. Therefore, they keep fiddling with pay, bonus, and financial incentives in a futile attempt to find the elusive combination that will motivate people to higher performance.
According to Carter McNamara, PhD, there are common myths around motivation that are misunderstood.
- “I can motivate people.” You can’t motivate people anymore than you can empower them. People have to motivate themselves.
- “Money is a good motivator.” It usually prevents individuals from becoming less motivated, but not more motivated.
- “Fear is a good motivator.” Fear is a great motivator, but only on a short-term level.
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“I know what motivates me, so I know what motivates my employees.” Different things motivate different people. (4)
We must determine where the gap lies between an individual’s actual state and a desired state. Motivation is how the gap can be reduced. The most popular strategies for improving motivation are:
- Positive Reinforcement and High Expectations
- Effective Discipline and Punishment
- Treating Everyone Fairly
- Ongoing Training
- Setting Work Related Goals
- Base Rewards on Job Performance
Creating goals around each individual employee can help motivate and structure the workplace. Training and development plans can be customized to fit the needs of each individual. This can include high expectations, satisfying employees’ needs, ongoing training, setting work related goals and involve rewards upon success or completion.
Recognition of achievement is a good example of improving an employee's view of himself. Awards or recognition in the newspaper or company circular are excellent ways to denote worth to the company. Self-improvement, hence self-esteem, can be improved by sending people to special schools or short courses, or paying for home study courses or similar improvement programs. Enhancing self-esteem improves feelings of self-confidence, strength, worth, and usefulness to the business organisation. This will invoke the ‘feel good factor’ and feeling good about yourself is a tremendous motivator. Keep employees in the information loop. Make sure that they know about critical organisational accomplishments, challenges or opportunities, being informed gives employees a feeling of ownership. Many managers let their people know when it is too late. This causes people to feel more like victims than participants. Simply put, being involved and informed stimulates interest and interest stimulates motivation.
Provide direct, personal feedback to employees as quickly as possible preferably within 24 hours. Most people really want to know what their manager thinks of their work. The more detailed and constructive the feedback, the better. Handwritten comments signed by the manager are usually best, but providing feedback can also be done through e-mail.
Employees, like everyone else, feel a strong need to belong and feel accepted. If managers provide an attractive room, where they can sit down and enjoy a few minutes of each other's company and a little refreshment, important social needs have been fulfilled. Employees become better acquainted and develop friendships. Such a management policy encourages employee cooperation and provides incentive to work towards the best interests of all of the employees and the business. Other motivators include celebrating employee birthdays, anniversaries and work-related milestones. In addition, social and recreational activities, including employee football, cricket and bowling leagues create a sense of togetherness and team spirit.
Researching this question has highlighted many motivational aids which are available to management, however, I believe that organisations cannot motivate their employees; instead, they can create a work environment where individual motivation flourishes. All individuals have different motivational factors; but if they find the right environment, they will create their own self-motivation.
2b What steps can a manager take to motivate his or her subordinates
- Ensure adequate levels of pay
- Train the individual so as to enable him to master the job, and eventually move to a bigger one
- Develop a team spirit in which the members feel that they can support the others and yet be supported by them as well
- Provide means whereby the employee can measure his progress in the job
- Take an interest in the person and thank him when he has worked well
- Ensure that the person’s job was a challenging one, however modest the level
- Keep the employee well-informed about matters that may concern him.
- Most people are motivated by money to the extent that they come to work to fulfil their economic needs. It is very debatable whether people are motivated to work harder for the lure of money. Even where money is seen as a real incentive, the evidence seems to be that it is not a lasting form of motivation.
- Most people are also motivated by the social contacts they make at work, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that formation of social relationships and the need to belong to groups, is a very important motivator. The building of supportive work teams can therefore be a powerful motivator to people.
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A person’s standing or reputation at work are important motivators, whether he receives then from his peers or from the organisation .Opportunities to achieve and to receive recognition for that achievement are also significant factors in the work needs of people. On balance, the evidence seems to suggest that motives associated with job itself are the most likely to encourage people at work. Nothing succeeds like success. (5)
3a Comment on the usefulness of the Seven Point Plan as a framework for the preparation of person specifications in the selection process.
When an organisation is looking to recruit new employees, be it for various reasons, firstly a medium for recruitment and selection needs to be decided upon. An organisation needs to decide which method of Recruitment & Selection is the most efficient and effective way of finding the right candidate(s). There are several recognised methods which management can use to find the most suitable candidate, (Rodger’s 7 Point Plan & Monro-Fraser’s 5 Point Plan) and many more variations of these plans.
Most interviewers use one of the two basic classification schemes, the most common being Rodger’s Seven Point Plan 1950. The Seven Point Plan is the name given to the classification of personal requirements produced by Prof Alec Rodger of the National Institute for Industrial Psychology (NIIP) in the 1950s in Britain. The classification is as follows.
- Physical make up (Build, height colouring etc)
- Attainments (exam passes)
- General intelligence
- Specialist aptitudes (particular skills)
- Interests
- Disposition (character or personality)
- Circumstances (Domestic and personal situation)
The usefulness of the plan lies in its application to employee assessment, especially, in the area of selection. The range of factors in the Plan covers most of the attributes that could be overlooked in an employee. If it is applied to an individual employee or candidate, then at least the right sort of questions are going to be asked about that person’s suitability for a particular job. Such a plan also enables personnel specifications to be written up for job vacancies in order to clarify what kind of person is to be sought . (6)
3b To what extent are alternative frameworks available?
Rodger’s Seven Point Plan (7 PP) may have proved its worth in the past, but in today’s society, there are unscrupulous people looking for a chance to take legal action for discrimination, Rodger’s plan has to be used very carefully. Sisson’s states‚“Rodger's headings 'circumstances' and 'acceptability' have strong potential to be used as a cloak for improper discrimination“ (7)
Companies use many variations of the 7 PP to suit their individual needs, Munro-Fraiser’s Five Point Plan (1954), which is rather more condensed than the Rodger plan in that it does not refer to general intelligence and specialised aptitudes which can hardly be measured in an interview, but refers to innate abilities, which place the emphasis on skills generally rather than reasoning power. (8) Alternatives of this plan can also be used to suit the differing needs of employers.
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Impact on others or the kind of response a person's appearance, speech and manner calls out from others.
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Qualifications and experience the skill and knowledge required for different jobs.
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Innate abilities how quickly and accurately a person's mind works.
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Motivation the kind of work that appeals to a person and the amount of effort they are prepared to put into it.
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Emotional (psychological/interpersonal) adjustment capacity to work and cope with the demands of living and working with other people
Although many employers still use these traditional classification schemes as a framework for recruitment and selection, they are becoming increasingly dated. A more comprehensive approach to recruitment & selection is provided by Assessment Centres, they are the product of an evolving recruitment & selection process. When screening potential employees it has become commonplace for companies and other organisations to use various, and in some cases quite advanced, methods of analysing applicants’ personalities. The use of cognitive and psychometric tests appears to be quite popular, they supplement selection with information acquired from testing data, which allows for a more informed decision to be made. “Psychometric testing refers to any technique that has been devised for measuring an aspect of psychological functioning.“ (9) (Malin and Birch 1988) They provide a better indepth look at the candidate(s) by incorporating a wide range of assessment techniques. Assessment Centers allow for greater comparisons to be made between potential candidates, they allow for group exercises, which relate directly to the job. Candidates are subject to scrutiny by a panel of observers so an informed decision can be made. This allows a less biased decision to be made and as the whole assessment process is longer and more interactive, theoretically, it allows for a better decision to be made. As well as personality tests, interviews are also a widely used tool in personnel selection. The way in which an interview is conducted can range from a completely free, formless conversation over semi-structured types to fully structured variants with standardised questions and processes.
3c How do these alternatives compare with the Seven Point Plan?
The usefulness of the 7 Point Plan lies in its application to employee assessment, especially in the area of selection. The range of factors in the Plan covers most of the attributes that could be looked for in an employee. (10) Munro-Fraser’s 5 point plan is simpler than the 7 PP but focuses more upon what has occurred in the applicant’s career and may indicate future potential. The use of cognitive and psychometric tests appears to be quite popular, psychometric personality tests are useful in that they are easy to administer and the data gained from them can be quickly and effectively quantified and also easily accessed at a later date. Although Assessment Centers allow for a greater indepth look at employees and closer scrutiny, the fact is they are expensive, time consuming and don't guarantee success.
4a Describe the opportunities which in general sense the Internet may offer to the property and the construction professions using examples from your own profession.
The construction industry is becoming increasingly reliant on new electronic technology, ranging from project-specific Web sites and online equipment auctioning to bid analysis software and negotiation tools. The Internet is the world's largest marketplace, growing dramatically as more vendors and consumers go online everyday. For the construction industry, the Internet presents a novel opportunity to negotiate bulk prices, purchase hard-to-find products from and sell surplus materials to a market that expands well beyond traditional regional boundaries. Ideally, the results are more opportunities for sellers and better selection and prices for consumers. Contractors can chose from a list of vendors, locate those with available supplies and negotiate price and delivery terms. Some sites allow contractors to post requests for quotations and receive replies online. Overall, the internet promises the industry faster deliveries, cheaper prices, improved procurement tracking and more informed purchasing decisions.
Construction companies looking to purchase and sell online may find the Internet ideal in many ways for contracting. Online contracting actually eliminates some of the ambiguities and other problems inherent in conventional written agreements. For example, many businesses traditionally contracted with each other through the exchange of pre-printed contracts. Sometimes online contracts are formed via e-mail communications rather than through standard forms on Web sites. In these cases, the parties commonly agree upon the basic terms of the contract, such as product information and price.
As for my own profession, that of fire-fighter, we use the same technology, management systems and interfaces as those companies competing in the commercial market, but instead of e-commerce it is known as e-fire. E-fire is the use of electronic means to communicate effectively internally, with external organisations and members of the public via a range of communication media. Typical interfaces are telephony, facsimile, email, intranet, internet and extranet together with video conferencing within more developed organisations. As technology improves and convergence of communication and information technology allows the boundaries between the varied communication platforms to merge, thus enabling services to be delivered via communication portals, varied communications can be directed through one system or dynamically linked systems for better management. In broad terms efire has four guiding principles:-
- Delivering services around community requirements
- Making Humberside Fire & Rescue Service and its services more accessible
- Social inclusion
- Utilising information better.
The government intends that all services that can be electronically delivered should be. The strategy proposes that they should be accessible over the Internet and through mobile phones (WAP), digital TV, and call centres as well as through personal computers. The mix for any service will be determined in relation to demand. Electronic service delivery does not do away with the need for personal contact and this must be better supported. Services should be tailored to individuals' needs. Humberside Fire & Rescue Service has developed a business portal, initially for employees, and a personalised 'home page' for individuals. It has done so in a non-exclusive way and has created the conditions for others, including community enterprises, to create innovative service offerings. New ways of doing business has changed the relationship between individuals and Humberside Fire & Rescue Service. Access to information has been firmly established under the Freedom of Information legislation and government and local government organisations are more responsive to citizens' views. At the same time, it is vital to make sure that people can trust the systems we use, by ensuring that their personal data is protected and that systems are secure. The systems can be used for a range of topics from consultation to end user feedback giving a measure of performance on both pro-active fire safety and reactive services.
Online public services such as FS Direct (Fire Safety) and Fire Education are well designed and accessible to all. This includes providing services for minority language groups and those with disability or limited mobility. New services must be developed so that they are available to all and easy to use. Digital TV and mobile phones will become increasingly important as a means of accessing the Internet. The government is committed to making it easier for all people to get access, whether individually or through community facilities. The telephone will remain a preferred means of contact for many. Call centres must be improved by giving their staff access to information networks that will enable them to provide better service. Better information systems will support the work of those who have face-to-face contact with the public.
The services can be accessed by multiple technologies, including web sites accessible from PCs, kiosks, mobile phone and digital TV, and call and contact centres. Those on web sites, call centres and digital TV have already been published atwww.iagchampions.gov.uk/guidelines.htm. The underlying principle is to promote collaborative approaches to the use of these media across the public sector in the interests of accessibility, quality, familiarity and ease of use and establishment of coherent branding. A portal access to services and information on the Internet for employees and the communities we serve. The portal site will not only be for service delivery and internal functions, it will not necessarily preclude the delivery of services through commercial portal sites. Departments within Humberside Fire & Rescue Service may use the portal for tasks such as the bulk transfer of data between the businesses or government as a method for electronic data interchange.
Electronic communication is becoming more the norm therefore Humberside Fire & Rescue Service will continue to develop electronic communication tools via the Internet via www.humberfire.gov.uk and other such sites deemed appropriate. The development of a seamless interface between the Intranet and the Internet will be via an extranet service. Trusted users are able to dial into the Intranet and access work applications and data and employees can send information, place orders and carry out their duties electronically, which has enhanced the quality of service and administration within Humberside Fire & Rescue Service. Community Fire Stations are able to have private areas on the Intranet together with access to the Internet opening up another line of communication with their communities. They can keep their web page up-to-date and customise it to reflect the community they serve.
CITU is establishing common standards and infrastructure to enable inter-operability across government departments and the wider public sector. The policies and standards will also ensure that government organisations can communicate electronically with citizens and businesses. This has been achieved through wide adoption of Internet and World Wide Web technologies for all government information systems. Humberside Fire & Rescue Service has to ensure that all development will meet inter-operability standards. This will require migration of systems to support Internet Protocol (IP) standards and interface to the GSI and the Government Gateway. The network systems is therefore based on IP communications and IP communications standards throughout the organisations, starting with new systems, and browser enabled desk-top workstations, with e-mail and Web access for most if not all employees. The inter-operability framework also requires the adoption by public sector bodies of common standards so that e-mail and electronic documents can be exchanged within the public sector and with citizens and businesses.
E-fire will elevate Humberside Fire Brigade into the ‘techno-century’ and will enable it to compete for external funding, increase its profile within the public sector and it will make the organisation transparent to those within and outside the organisation.
4a Discuss the statement that ‘e-commerce is no longer about business-to-consumer communications but about business-to-business between an organisation and its partners
Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is an extension of traditional commerce, which is concerned with the activities of business, industry and trade, including nominally, the exchange of goods, services, information and money. E-commerce is the projection of one's business into cyberspace.
E-commerce has now become common use throughout the world; it involves making it easier for individuals and businesses to exchange goods and services on-line. E-commerce arose from the internet, which can be used to communicate and collaborate, search, access and retrieve information, participate in on-line discussion, provide information, share information, find entertainment, and carry out business transactions and financial transactions. E-commerce also includes all company functions like marketing, finance manufacturing, selling and negotiation. E-commerce is carried out by the use of e-mail, EDI, file transfers, fax and videoconference.
Business-to-business (B2b). This is the transaction between two businesses. The B2b group includes all applications intended to enable or improve relationships within firms and between two or more companies. In the past this has largely been based on the use of private networks and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Examples from the B2b category are the use of the Internet for searching product catalogues, ordering from suppliers, receiving invoices and making electronic payments. This category also includes collaborative design and engineering, and managing the logistics of supply and delivery
The business-to-consumer (B2c) group is a much newer area and largely equates to electronic retailing over the Internet. This category has expanded greatly in the late 1990s with the growth of public access to the internet. The B2c category includes electronic shopping, information searching (e.g. railway timetables) but also interactive games delivered over the Internet. Popular items purchased via electronic retailing are airline tickets, books, computers, videotapes, and music CDs. These transactions are the same as the traditional method of retailing, except there is an electronic medium use. An example of this is www.amazon.com (online book retailers) who sell directly to consumers in order to achieve very low prices.
The Economist 26 February 2000 issue that in 1999, global e-commerce was worth a little over $150 billion with around 80 per cent of these transactions being between one business and another. It was also noted by Forrester, a respected research organisation in the field, the value of E-Commerce market is to reach nearly $1.5 trillion in the USA alone by 2003. Another respected market researcher, Gartner, has forecast that by one year later, 2004, the global B2B ecommerce market will have continued growing and will be worth £4.8 trillion. (11)
With figures like these it is easy to see why businesses have started to invest heavily in IT systems which will interface more readily with world-wide-web resources. For many years the B2b market was slow and companies did not have the correct software to integrate with point of sales software. B2b e-commerce can be seen as a kind of third wave of e-commerce, following the first wave that consisted only in a web site where the company offered a catalogue of its products, and a second wave where the consumer could buy those products by a link established between the web site and the company's back-end. In this third wave the company is so focused on the internet that not only does it offer its services to its clients online but also it does business with its providers online too. A simple analogy of these waves could be internet, intranet, extranet. The Internet came first and linked users around the globe via phone lines, dedicated lines or through other networks. Intranets, which link users in one organisation, followed. separate intranets from the Internet and prevent outside users from accessing the internal networks unless they are authorised. Then along came extranets, as a means to link intranets of various companies with their business partners.
Extranets were developed as a response to the needs of partnerships in the business sector. Such relationships between business partners are called B2b. They need a network, which will enable them to exchange sensitive information via setting levels of network accessibility. There are different types of extranet. Based on the business sector, extranets are classified as:
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Supplier extranets. A supplier extranet links store branches to their central store, in order to facilitate workflow and maintain the required level of stocks in the inventory. It reduces the possibility of rejecting orders due to shortage of stocks, in addition to providing many services related to inventory control.
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Distributor extranet. A distributor extranet gives different levels of authorization to various individuals, depending on the size of the dealings. It also provides services such as electronic order and automated settlements, as well as lists of new products and specifications.
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Peer extranet. A peer extranet promotes equal competition between the different companies in the business sector, as it links small and large companies and enables them to share product prices and specifications. This helps improve the products and services of a company, and curbs monopoly.
Many companies have gained numerous benefits from extranets. It is possible to build extranets that link distributors with main suppliers. This accelerates operations in the processing and shipping of orders. It is also possible to develop an application based on the concept of request point, to automate distribution and payments. In this case, when the distributor’s stocks of a certain product fall below a preset quantity (called request point) a message will be sent to the supplier to request more of that product.
Extranets are now one of the most popular technologies in the information age. Analysts and researchers expect extranets to replace special purpose networks that are currently used in the fields of e-businesses and e-commerce, as extranets are cheaper to build than special purpose networks, in addition to their capability in facilitating management operations and improving communications with the clients.
The benefits of e-commerce to B2b partnerships are many. The first obvious benefit is reduced costs, which occur from no paper and postage costs, time between receipt and implementation of an order being reduced and scheduling information being transmitted with the ordering data. Manufacturing companies can plan the production more accurately, hence, cost saving. The cash flow is greatly improved under EDI with EFT (Electronic Fund Transfer) which is a electronic transfer value tool, EFT also compliments EDI allowing partners to improve financial management and with EFT payments arrive on the date agreed and not 2-4 days following postage EDI brings with it reduced errors as information never has to be received or copied. Also EDI can be integrated with the companies current system avoiding re-input data, eliminating possible error and reducing time. One of The greatest things about EDI is when a message is received a message is sent back to the sender confirming its arrival. This is the equivalent to a postal registered mail.
When looking at e-commerce globally B2b is growing at an unprecedented rate and is far surpassing B2c but I don’t believe e-commerce is just about B2b communications. There are success stories within other areas of e-commerce, such as person-to-person communications, the best example being E-bay with a turn over in excess of $100 million. There was also Napster, which had one of the biggest ‘share-ware’ communities with millions of members. The growth of business-banking and Tesco-online are excellent examples of B2c. E-commerce is about communication, buying and selling, the fact is that the B2b sector has finally got its act together, after realising the potential of e-commerce and investing in technology it is now reaping the rewards.
References
1:- Theodore Roosevelt. Teamwork: Theodore Roosevelt Quote
2:- Advantages of Delegation.
3:- Westerman and Donoghue www.ep.liu.se/exjobb/eki/2002/fek/009/exjobb.pdf
4:- Carter McNamara, PhD www.mapnp.org/library/org_perf/bal_card.htm
5:- G.A Cole Management Theory and Practice
6:- G.A Cole Management Theory and Practice
7:- Sisson (1994) www.busmgt.ulst.ac.uk/ modules/bmg355j1/docs/bmg355j1.doc
8:- G.A Cole Management Theory and Practice
9:- Marlin and Birch Motivational theories www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/ doi/10.1046/j.1442-200x.2000.01176.x/pdf
10:- G.A Cole Management Theory and Practice
11:- The Economist 26 February 2000 www.bradford.ac.uk/acad/management/ external/pdf/workingpapers/2003/Booklet_03=12.pdf -
Bibliography
1:- G.A Cole Management Theory and Practice
2:-CEM Introduction to Management
3:-
4:-www.constructionweblinks.xom/resources/industry/Reports_newsletter/e-commerce.htm
5:-www.strategies.ic.gc.ca/epic/internet/incc_cc.nsf.htm
6:-www.architect.org/links/building_construction.htm
7:-www.findarticles.com/p/search
8:-propertyweek.co.uk/magazine/htm
9:-www.edilportale.com/dossier/doc/260304-1/htm/html