George Mayo comes to understand that work in general is should be a group activity as a whole. An adult’s social and business world is primarily governed and revolves around work activity. Mayo believes more in psychological success as an individual and therefore as a group, more than personal physical conditions. He states the need and want for recognition, security and sense of belonging is more important in working out and understanding worker’s morale than the physical decisions under which an individual works. He also believes that when a complaint or accusation, it is commonly a warning or symptom of brewing a disturbance of an individuals position within the organisation. Mayo encouraged better communication between worker’s and mangers, and believed this contributed hugely to how effectively employees are motivated into working for their bosses. He also emphasised how mangers should have a greater involvement in employee’s working lives, interfacing with workers and discussing issues and problems which are affecting them or their work. Mayo also encouraged teambuilding and working in groups in tight units, where you work together as a team utilising your own and other’s skills, and in turn the group will achieve the target togther.
David C McClelland’s theory involving the connection between the need to achieve and motivational factors are very relevant to today. He believed that achievement-motivated people tend to get more raises and are promoted faster because they are constantly trying to think of better ways of doing things. These people are motivated by the need to achieve, if there is an opening ahead in a better position for the taking, these people will do anything in their power to do so. Companies with these groups of people grow faster and are much more profitable. Some people do have an intense need to achieve, the others, perhaps the majority here are not concerned about achieving high goals and setting standards, they prefer a secure, steady growth. Achievement-motivated people behave like this all the time, but only if they can influence the outcome. If everyone was as achievement-motivated as a small percentage of the population is, we would all produce more as a business globally.
How are employees motivated in practice?
The success of any business can almost always be traced back to motivated employees. Productivity and profitability to recruiting and retention, hardworking and happy employees lead to succcess.
Many different factors motivate employees work harder, longer hours and increase their own personal productivity. Companies use various motivating tools in order gain some sort of trust with their employees, by using such tools you can aquire a more skilled and motivated workforce overall. Many techniques are used to motivate workers:
Non Financial Motivators:
- Good administration and labour realtions-keeping in constant communication with employees, empathising with their problems and together finding a solutiuon. Having a ‘hands on’ approach to the work in hand, talking to staff who work for you but not those necessarily in direct contact with you everyday.
- Creating acceptable working conditions for the employees who are working for you. Ensuring there is anough space, light, heat and time to achieve goals and targets that have been set.
- Create a challenging and interesting job for the people who work within the company. Making sure the a person’s job is creative and varied, and ensuring the security of that job, is it a temporary job or a permant position? This is called job enrichment and it gives workers aa chance to test themselves and use their full potential and create their own personal acvhievements.
- Giving employees certain amounts of responsibility can help to motivate and enthuse people to huge levels, being in control and personally respnsible for something within their company. This is called empowerment and it is when authority is given to employees so they can make their own decisions and choices. He workers can be encouraged to consider problems they may encounter every day and find solutions to answer these issues.
- If the company as a whole creates and maintains a pleasant and calm atmosphere, the overall mood of the workforce will be much happier as a whole. Remaining in contact with all the workforce and sympathising with their issues as well as addressing them, creates a much more informal atmosphere allowing colleagues to get on with each other much more easily.
- A technique called teambuilding can be implemented where employees work in groups togther to carry out flexible operations within the company. As employees are likely to be multi-skilled they can adapt to new techniques and work togther to solve problems. On the other hand if you do have a group of specialised personal, you can direct people to carry out different tasks in order to achieve something together as a team and fulfill a target that needed everyone’s skills and input. Teambuilding can meet a worker’s social needs as a person can more easily build friendships and feel a sense of belonging to a unit rather than the company or business as a whole.
Financial Motivators:
- Ensuring that your employees have an adequate and acceptable wage for the work they have been set to do, fair pay across all sexes, races and cultures. When certain benefits are given or rewarded, making sure the person who his owed them recieves their fair share and it is correctly given, or in any case enforcing ‘benefit fraud’ within the company. Securing perhaos paid holidays, sick pay. Maternal or paternal pay and further along down the line pensions.
- Creating a piece-rate, where you pay a worker per item produced in a given amount of time. This increases the speed of work and in turn productivity as individuals. Frequently the company does not have to use funds paying holidays or sick leave. Howver using a piece-rate may encourage workers to concentarte on quantity not quality of the products produced.
- Using a variety if benefits and bonuses is a succuessful technique in motvating employees to work harder and more fficiently. Fringe benfits encourage loyalty to the company so employees remain with the business for longer. These benefits may involve a company car, private health insurance and holidays. It also helps in meeting an employee’s human and social desires. However if used frequently and with a large amount of employees, it can prove to be very costly to the company as a whole.Other bonuses include profit sharing and share ownership.Profit sharing is were employees receive a certain proportion of the company’s profits. Workers can be persuaded to accept new changes to their working practices if they can see that it may decrease cost and so increase profits in turn benefitting them. However some workers feel even if they work hard, it will not have a noticeable effect on the company’s profit level. They may feel powerless to change it. Share ownership is giving a certain proportion of shares in the company to an employee instaed of a bonus or pay-rise. Employees will work harder as they have a stake in the company, just like other shareholders do.
Companies in conjunction with their managers are always trying to discover and find new techniques in motivating their workforce. If you succeed in having a collection of motivated employees, productivity as an individual would increase dramatically as the worker would have the want to work harder to achieve goals for himself and therefore together as a business. With a motivated workforce the company’s efficiency in the production of goods will increase dramatically, which in turn will soar profits above the level of other competing companies.
