Motivating Employees in Psu

Motivating Employees in PSU

Employee motivation is the level of energy, commitment and creativity that a company's workers apply to their jobs. In the increasingly competitive business environment of recent years, finding ways to motivate employees has become a pressing concern for managers. In fact, a number of different theories and methods of employee motivation have emerged, ranging from monetary incentives to increased involvement and empowerment. On one hand, high employee motivation can lead to improved organization performance while on the other hand an unmotivated employee can lead to widespread discouragement, declining morale and complacency. This in turn can reduce the entire organization productivity. Year on year, several studies and surveys have indicated that employee motivation in the public sector organizations is relatively less as compared to that in the private sector. As mentioned in the very beginning, this dwindling scale of employee motivation in the public sector can disrupt the smooth functioning of the various important pillars of our society and adversely affect the common public. Hence, instead of being passive onlookers, let us analyze this situation diligently in the light of understanding the true drivers of employee motivation and how to utilize them efficiently in order to develop productive and motivated employees in the public sector.

One approach to employee motivation has been to incorporate additional benefits to an individual's job as the primary factors behind improving performance. Endless mixes of employee benefits like health care, life insurance, profit sharing, employee stock ownership plans, exercise facilities, subsidized meal plans, child care availability, company cars and more - have been used by public sector organizations in their efforts to maintain happy employees in the belief that happy employees are motivated employees.

Many modern theorists, however, propose that the motivation an employee feels toward his or her job has less to do with material rewards than with the design of the job itself. Studies as far back as 1950 have shown that highly segmented and simplified jobs resulted in lower employee morale and output. Frederick Herzberg's motivation theory also states that satisfaction of the employees is associated with the non-monetary or intrinsic factors like achievement, recognition, personal growth and the characteristics of the work, that is, the intrinsic factors motivate the employee.

Porter and miles proved that motivation energises, directs and sustains behaviour. He also identified four factors or variables, namely, individual characteristics, job characteristics, work environment and the external environment. If motivation is to be affected, one or more of these variables must be changed or affected.

Thus, according to modern theorists, the following can be summarized as the basic characteristics of a motivating job:

* It must allow a worker to feel personally responsible for a meaningful portion of the work accomplished.

* It must provide outcomes which have intrinsic meaning to the individual

* It must provide the employee with feedback about his or her accomplishments.

There are as many different methods of motivating employees today as there are companies operating in the global business environment. The best employee motivation efforts will focus on what employees deem to be important. It may be that employees within the same department of the same organization will have different motivators. Keeping all these facts in mind, we will discuss some of the strategies which may lead to an improvement in employee motivation in the public sector organizations.

Employee Recognition Programs

Every employee has a need for praise and recognition, and the more often they get it the better. The two key issues to be discussed here are - why are public sector employees dissatisfied with their organization's award programs and what can managers do to improve the effectiveness of these programs.

One key problem with traditional company awards is that many public managers rely on them as their primary-if not their only mechanism for recognizing superior performance. This approach has two key shortcomings. Firstly, employees need recognition more than once a year. So relying entirely on agency awards - which are typically given at big annual or semi-annual award ceremonies is simply inadequate. Secondly, since so much time elapses between award cycles, it makes a very weak linkage between accomplishments and rewards. Thus, in order to make employee recognition programs more effective, it is crucial that managers should:

* think more strategically about how to tie awards directly to results

* reward employees for great work in a much more timely manner

* use a wider menu of options for employee recognition.

Managers can tie awards to performance targets in the context of a team system. Recognizing teams for achieving specific targets or goals can do a great deal to energize employees and promote collaboration within the work unit. The award can serve as a focus for celebrating the achievement of a common goal. Moreover, managers can create their own awards like award certificates to enhance the employee recognition program. In this case, the managers can structure the award criteria in a way that will help the employees establish short-term performance goals in alignment with the organization's mission and vision. Goals tend to be motivating and hence the awards that are tied to specific goals can actually drive performance.

Feedback

Another key factor which must be considered when working to motivate public sector employee relates to feedback. "Feedback, or telling employees how well they are performing, is an essential element for effective organizational functioning. Feedback affects both employee motivation and performance" (Yeager, Rabin and Vocino - 1985).

In many work situations, feedback is given only when an individual makes a mistake or does not meet the expectation of his supervisor. When employees demonstrate positive job performance, it is not always readily recognized. If public sector administrators make better efforts to provide feedback, particularly emphasizing the positive, they may begin to notice a higher level of motivation among their staff members.

Adequate feedback has positive impacts on motivation in general, effort, goal setting, performance adjustment and improvement and goal attainment. Since feedback is an