Building Employee Motivation & Loyalty
Written & copyrighted by Richard Paris Borough, Ph.D.

Building employee motivation and loyalty requires a certain type of working environment; learn what it is and the two most important things you can do to create it.

How important is employee motivation to your business? How about loyalty, is that important? Here's a truism for you. A business exists to make a profit. So the number one thing a business needs from its employees is support for the profit goal. And of course most employers have limits as to how much money they can pay their employees. Another truism.

Business Coaching for Employee Loyalty
So if you're an employer what can you do? Well first you can understand the seven reasons why people work for you, they are: 1) To be recognized for contributions and accomplishments, 2) To be respected as individuals, 3) To have more personal choice and freedom, 4) To have interesting things to do, 5) To have money, financial security, and lifestyle quality, and, 6) To be challenged to grow, and 7) To stay health and well. Notice that recognition is on top of this list and that money is #5. This is the proper ranking of these items.

Business Coaching for Employee Motivation
So what top non-material things, that have nothing to do with money, do employees most want? It's to be recognized for their accomplishments and respected as individuals. If, as an employer you give your employees chance to tell you how they want that recognition and respect to be given to them, and if it is within your ability to do as they ask, and if you indeed give them some of what they want, they will work long and hard to support you and your profit goal.

Where Does Employee Motivation Come From?
Is this all you need to know about employee motivation? No, you need to understand that although you can intimidate, threaten, cajole, entice, stimulate, influence and all that, you cannot truly motivate another person. Threats can motivate people in a dark alley, but they don't fly very well in the workplace. Sincere, lasting, genuine motivation has to come from within.

Business Coaching as the Business Owner
Therefore, your role as owner, manager, and chief decision maker is to create a supportive environment, which encourages your employee's naturally occurring motivation to spontaneously develop. And to do that does not require vast expenditures of additional capital. But you do have to ask people to talk with you about what they want. What a concept this is. Asking employees what non-material things it would take for them to be happier and more productive at work, and then seeing if you can provide that for them. This certainly is a good idea.

Building Employee Motivation Through Empowerment
Here's another big thing you can do. You can give your employees a modicum of apparent control over their destiny. Modicum means small amount, a little bit. To explain this concept, let me relate a story from In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peter's. Peter's reports on two groups of people who were given the task of proof reading technical manuals. Both groups were to do this work in an environment with phones ringing, noisy copy machines running, and traffic noise drifting in from the street below. One of the two groups was given an "off switch" which when pushed would turn off the noise by shutting down the phones, copy machines, and closing the windows. The other group had no such switch. As you might expect the group with the off switch did the editing task several times better, with fewer errors, and they even did it faster. This is not surprising. Noise is a major distraction and excessive noise interferes with concentration and, therefore, with productivity.

Power to Produce
But there's more to this story. For you see, the group that had the off switch never used it. So how do we account for the significant difference in this group's productivity? The answer may surprise you. The mere knowledge that they could exert control by shutting off the noise made the difference. The group with the switch they didn't use, had a modicum of apparent control over their environment, and that made a big difference.

Build Employee Motivation and Loyalty
And there you have it. To build more motivation and loyalty into your workplace, do at least these two things. Find out what non-material things your employees want, (it'll probably be some from of attention from you), and if possible supply them with that. And find ways to give your employees a measure of apparent control over their environment. These actions empower employees, getting them to exert extraordinary energy and effort above and beyond the call of duty. And do you want that kind of productive energy expressed by your employees? Yes!

You may use this article in whole or in part on your site as long as you link back to Master-Mind Alliance and give author credit.

Richard Paris Borough, Ph.D. , is President of Strategic Business Development; a Humboldt County, California based small business consulting firm. He is director of The Master-Mind Alliance -- and also publishes “Keys To A DONE BUSINESS” -- a monthly newsletter featuring business management best practices.

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