Work Place Motivation and Job Redesign Paper

WORKPLACE MOTIVATION 1

Work Place Motivation and Job Redesign Paper

PSY 320 Human Motivations

University of Phoenix

Penelope Morris

September 16, 2007

Shelly Peed, M.A., LPC

WORKPLACE MOTIVATION 2

Motivation in the work place is important however it is difficult for organizations to compete with extremely fast development of the economic environment for health care. The rapid growth of technology and the increase in the nursing demand makes it harder than ever to attract, recruit and retain nurses and especially retain experienced nurses in the workforce. This paper will exam how various motivational strategies effect the productivity in the nursing work place. This paper will also discuss an explanation of organizational efforts to improve performance, employee's resistance to increasing productivity, and the management's philosophy of motivation and its practice. This paper will identify and analyze the implications of applying two motivational theories that are not currently in practice in nursing practice and how these motivational theories would impact both management and employee.

Motivating nurses and retaining nurses can be very difficult task for the nurse leader because of the culture diversity in our society such as generation gaps, cultural differences, and even educational gaps. Nurse leaders face dilemmas everyday in the nursing field and even more complex dilemmas with retaining and motivating nurses to join or even remain in the profession. Unhappy nurses can be a nurse manager's nightmare. High turnover rates, increased absenteeism rates, low morale, decrease or lack of customer service, decrease or inadequate quality of patient care which all will decrease efficiency and productivity on the nursing unit. All of these can result from lack of leadership and lack of employee/team motivation.

In the work place that I have experience as a nurse unit manager, motivating nurses was the hardest job I have ever had to do. However, I found that recognizing achievement, promoting involvement and regular follow up with feedback where the strategies that where most effective for increasing efficiency and productivity. The nursing unit that I managed was a dynamic nursing unit. The nurses deserved an atmosphere that was respectful as well as a healthy environment to work in. As unit manager and the help of senior nurse leaders on the unit were

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able to provide this atmosphere for the nursing staff through shared governance councils developed on the unit. We had four councils the professional practice council, quality council, resource management council and educational council. These councils allowed us to create recognition programs and promote staff involvement on the unit. "Employees of all ages generally like the feeling of involvement." (Sujansky, 2007).

Involving staff in decisions and empowering them provide accountability and ownership of the unit which in turn motivated them to improve efficiency and productivity on our unit. Recognizing and praising staff provided an advantage for me as the unit manager by increasing confidence, self esteem and self worth in my nurses. For example I would recognize staff in staff meetings for accomplishments such as extra classes attended or names mentioned on a patient survey, WOW awards for an exceptional job well done and for going above and beyond their duty, emails from peers or round catching. This motivated staff to do well so that they would be recognized and in turn increased quality, productivity, and efficiency on our unit. The resource management council was responsible for sending staff birthday cards, get well cards, and sympathy cards when needed. They were also responsible for providing celebrations for our unit for any reason to celebrate. Motivating staff is the key to increasing teamwork, morale, performance, efficiency and productivity.

Being the nurse unit manager I depended on my staff to be productive and get things done. Motivation was the key for me to get my nurses to perform at a high quality level that was an expectation from our team and even our organization. I found that the nurses needed to be motivated to want to improve their nursing practice. However nurses did resist motivation and especially change simply because general resistance to change and automatic unconscious process to place a wall or barrier to change simply because it is different. New ideas and innovations can be scary and slow down forward progress on performance improvement issues on a nursing unit however the nurse unit