2.3 Also in class we looked at a video on motivation at Ford. This was good as it showed me how the techniques at a company of Fords calibre worked in practice and what ideas to motivate their worker they had thought of. It also taught me how you have to be careful that you don’t try and mix the employees up with you scheme to maximise profits as this what Ford did. They found away of motivating the workers by creating a production line as this made the work easier, but when they kept speeding it up to maximise the output for the company this de-motivated the workers and eventually caused the founding of unions.
- Findings
3.1 After receiving back the questionnaires I looked at the results and then interpreted the ones that I could into charts to it made the analysing process easier. The question I choose to interpret was what motivates people in the workplace the pie charts look at each of the age groups I covered. I used the age groups and created one pie chart to find out what motivates each of these age groups. With the younger generation the results showed what I expected with the majority (55% out of the 14 people in this age group we asked) said how the financial side motivates them most. This is because they all have our wants and needs, also the younger generations look at the high flying business men who own the fast cars and they want to become like this. However this trend does not carry on through out the rest of the survey, the next age group we covered was 21 – 25 year olds. I would have imagined that their most motivating factor would have to be again the financial side due to them just starting out with work. But I was then found out to be wrong, s 50% chose the social side.
As we started to interview more people who fell into the older age category I discovered less people were more motivated by the non-financial side. Out of curiosity asked a couple of the interviewees why this was, both replied by telling me how they have received their company cars and other incentives and were aiming to work harder to push for promotion, this was now their main motivation factor. This falls into the financial side, as it will lead to more money due to higher wages and salaries.
From looking at the rest of the questionnaires I also discovered some other factors about motivation in the work place. That most of the companies try to motivate their employees by offering them bonuses and by paying them high wages. This was not however shown in what people said motivates them most as on the whole it was split between money and financial, but none of the people who we interviewed said that their company holds any social functions besides the ones on special occasions. 3.2 The two motivation theories we looked at were Herzberg and Taylor’s and they both covered information that they have discovered about making people work better for the company and for the company to help motivate the workers better. I have looked at each theory and have tried to see from the results if the theories work in practice today.
Taylor’s idea was that every person who worked were only motivated to do more work as they knew they would get money at the end if it. He also thought that a way to motivate people was by their employers offering them an incentive or the opposite by scaring them i.e. scaring them.
From what Taylor said is true that we get motivated today by the prospect of receiving money, however when he wrote this statement he wrote it at a time when there was a much lower standard of living. So the need to work for money was higher to look after the workers families.
Herzberg theory lists the five most important factors of people’s jobs. He did a survey just like the one I complied of two hundred employees and he asked them what were the last five recent events which gave them most job satisfaction. The five were:
- Achievement
- Recognition
- Work in general
- Responsibility
- Promotion
I feel that in this day and age Herzberg theory relates more to motivation. This is because it covers a wider range of motivational tactics. Also from finding his results by using a questionnaire it enable him to gather information on other topics e.g. what de-motivates you. This is why we chose this technique as we discovered that one of the most de-motivating factors of work is the working environment, this was found mainly from teachers!
4.0 Conclusion
So from carrying out my questionnaire I have discovered that there is a defiant range of motivations techniques that different workplaces have used. It has also told me that as you get older you ideas of work and motivation are greater as you are not dreaming about money as much and concentrating on work and getting promoted. But the main motivational tactic that men like is the prospect of a high salary at lots of bonuses. So men are easily motivated its just the managers need to do a questionnaire to find out what they are motivated by more and see if what the company offers is enough to make their workers work to their full potential.
Signed………………………………………………………. Date ( 23/09/02 )
