Best Practices On How To Give Motivations To Employees (Essay Sample)

Name:
Tutor:
Course:
Date:
How to motivate employees
Introduction
Every organization aims at achieving its targeted goals and objectives to survive in the business environment. Achieving these objectives is very possible when the organization’s members of staff are well motivated to partake their roles and responsibilities according to their job descriptions. It is however not the case in some organizations as majority of them are not focused on creating good working environment that can inspire productivity. This is known as lack of motivation.
Employee motivation can be increased through creation of various work-based opportunities that in one way or the other reward the employee intrinsically while improving their worth at the company. When staff’s spirits re raised to perform optimally, they utilize the available resources to ensure maximal output. Organizations therefore work very hard to create the opportunities that will improve the growth of individual employee.
Certain steps taken by various organizations to impact the new energy to their staff include job design, rewards, job characteristic model, employee participation and quality of work-life programs. Using rewards to motivate an employee can be subdivided as both extrinsic and intrinsic. Intrinsic rewards are the psychologically based rewards that are inform of accomplishments and the fulfillment one has after completing a task. Extrinsic rewards such as money and trophies are the rewards given to an employee from the company. This may also include annual bonuses and salary increment.
Pierce et al., in their study of how extrinsic rewards affects people’s intrinsic motivation established that when one is rewarded with money and other extrinsic rewards on the basis of optimal work performance, they tend to have a feeling of accomplishment. This perceived self-accomplishment greatly improve the future rate of work performance. It is therefore of great importance to acknowledge peoples hard work by offering the rewards that will definitely improve their work performance hence the increased productivity.
Job design also offers a source of motivation to employees. Jobs that are designed to meet both the interesting and the challenging experience greatly impact on the betterment of the employees’ wellbeing. There are various approaches to job design including but not limited to job enlargement, job rotation, job enrichment and job simplification. Job enlargement offers to combine tasks so as to give an employee more experience while at work. Job specification standardizes and specializes tasks to match an employee’s area of skill and mastery. It makes the staff more professional and skilled in dealing with various job based tasks as their roles clearly matches their skills. When tasks are specialized, the employee has all it takes to perform optimally. It is by this virtue also that their work energy levels improves.
Job rotation ensure that all the staff members are equipped with the necessary skills to perform in the other center of operations while at the company. Accountants may get a chance to serve at the reception while the receptionists get a chance to serve at the sales department. These opportunities make the staff learn new work-based skills that build their competence and confidence levels. Finally, part of the job design as a motivating factor include the job enrichment. This is the inclusion of the interesting factors of the job to improve the acceptance by the job holders.
Campion and Thayer in their study of employee motivation established that those jobs with motivational factors improve the employee’s wellbeing and have great health benefits with less job efforts. The above mentioned designs are therefore key to ensuring optimal output in the work place. An organization should therefore put itself at a point of advantage by designing jobs that fairly suit the skills and experiences of each employee.
The job characteristic model of employee intrinsic motivation is well placed to learn and understand the requirement of each job and match it with the job holder hence minimizing frustrations that may result from mismatching the job and the job holder. These key job characteristics include skill variety, task significance, task identity, task feedback, task significance and autonomy. Skill variety dictates the degree at which that specific job require various skills and experiences. Task identity is the contributions of the specific role to the larger project of concern. This identity defines the steps taken to complete the job. The significance of a certain task is the level in which the job affect the lives and work of others. The degree of freedom, independence and discretion of an employee to perform a job or the task autonomy, dictates the levels of motivation that in turn affect the job output of a certain job. Finally the model also states that there should be a clearer, actionable, detailed information about the significance of his or her job performance and how it affects the organizations out puts.
JCM has created a link between the model and the intrinsic employee motivation. It is described as a psychological state that increases the employee motivation. Organizations day to day problems can be solved through engaging the employees to participate in problem solving activities such as cost reductions, solving quality methods and improving production method...