CrazyMotive.com

In many organizations the problem is not with motivating employees. It is about not demotivating the people.

When a newbie comes to work, they are usually driven to produce and do their best. However, in over 80% of business entities the enthusiasm of employees plummets within a year and continues to decline with time. This fact has been found from surveying about 1.1 million people at 50 Fortune 1000 businesses over 2001-2004. The research was organized by Sirota Survey Intelligence.

The root of the evil is the actions of the management. It boils downs to how the company performs its hr policies and work procedures and how relationships are built with immediate superiors.There are some traits of character in managers that should be held accountable. And there are things that that can be done to turn things around.

What do people want at work?

If you want to satisfy somebody’s need, you need to know it. There are three things people want at their work place:

• Fair treatment. It is respect, honoring obligations in terms of money and job security.
• Accomplishment. Being proud to work in this company, for this boss.
• Good relationships at work with collegues.

If you want your people to be happy, focus on these three components. If all the three bits of the puzzle are in place, the workers will have more fun in comparison to a case when something is missing.

You cannot expect people to take your respect as a compensation for low pay. You cannot pay the bills with your pride. And getting tons of money is a poor substitute for a sense of achievement and pride.

Individual managers matter

There are things that have to be done on the level of the upper management. For example, a consistent approach to managing talent. However, enthusiasm and personal charisma can impact personnel motivation of subordinates.
The crucial element of employee management policy is offering them a sense of security. People must know that they will not be fired if they underperform. Firing people is the extreme method and not something to use when things go a bit in the wrong direction. Certainly, providing security is just a way to start.

Accomplishments

1. Provide people with a vision. To have enthusiasm in people you need to give them an understandable, believable and inspiring organizational mission. The answer to the question why the company exists and why the employees are working there (everything which is beyond the money).Just having a mission is not enough. It is equally important to communicate this mission to people.

2. Recognize for good results. No matter big or tiny each achievement should be recognized. A good compliment goes a long way to the workers heart. And nothing is more disheartening than getting no thanks for a well done job, but lots of criticism for a slip or mistake. People need recognition. It is a basic instinct. Rewarding success reinforces the behavior that lead to the accomplishment whereas punishment simply makes people complacent. However, no compliment is a good substitute for a fair pay.

3. Work to help your people succees. Being bossy and overdemanding is going to kill any enthusiasm there was left in your employees. However, making sure that your people have what they need to have things done will produce wonders. The role of the manager is primarily to be a communicator, facilitator and intermediary between his unit and other business elements. How do you know if people are coping? Talk to them! Talking to people openly helps you earn their trust. If you cannot solve the problem right away, let them know how it will be dealt with later.

4. Train your people. Many managers do not train their employees because they do not know how to do it properly. There are a few hints that can help. It is very important when working with people who do just fine to let them know you are okay with their performance, so that they know it is satisfactory. Then they will more happily accept and welcome constructive criticism.

5. Have a formal and meaningful feedback system. It would take a lot of words to discuss it all here, but some basic points:

• Give feedback when things happen. Do not wait for a formal appraisal. The goal of formal reports should be making a summary rather than an unpleasant surprise.
• Do not be afraid to criticize. Employees actually like to know if they are not performing properly. All the same, do not forget about praise. You should have a group of minds that you can rightfully praise all the time. Your feedback regarding areas for improvement should be specific, informational, with no emotions and about performance rather than employee’s personality. Do not say “The work was shoddy”. Instead explain the specifics of what and how should be improved.
• Focus on the employee’s role. Do not talk about things disconnected from the tasks you provide feedback on.Let employees tell you their side of the story. This is the chance for you to deal with their performance issues.
• Do not try to prove your position or superiority. Focus on improving performance. That is your goal of the conversation, remember?

Fair treatment

6. Do not unnecessarily restrict the flow of information in the company. Workers hate being excluded from the communication mechanisms. There should be some confidential information that has to be kept secret. Let your people know the rest.
If you communicate with people fully, you show them respect. It is a nice motivating factor to work for somebody who respects you.

7. Deal with poor performance. If there is poor performance from somebody, deal with it. It will make others feel proud of their work.

Relationships

8. Build teams. Most work requires an effort from a group of people. Problem solving can be more effective when done in groups. For many people working in a team is already a motivator. Allow people to have self-managed teams whenever it is possible. It reduces the need for management and results in a healthy reduction of costs.

All the elements combined

9. Listen to your people and engage them. It works with any employee, even part time ones. Show interest in your people’s ideas. Have frank conversations about improving effectiveness. Create the climate where the past is always not good enough and more innovation is expected.

After you define task boundaries, you should give your people the room to work and introduce changes on their own. Let your competent people do their work the way they see fit.

I am very curious about making myself more effective.There are tons of nice posts on the matter in the Internet. I have decided to pool back the basics into one post for me (and for you) and to go from there.

1. Understanding what is important

The shortest path to personal effectiveness has to lie through understanding what is important for you. People try to do stuff they believe is important. Believing and knowing your priorities may not be enough to succeed, but that is definetely a starting point.

2. Setting goals

We are bombarded with impulses: there are tons of unimportant things we fall for doing. Watching TV is the one biggest time consumer for many people. Currently, I am crazy about HOUSE M.D. series

However, if you know what is important for you, you can prioritize and you can set goals. The best goals are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.

Imagine that you are running a marathon. You couch wants to cheer you up. She comes up to you and shouts: ‘Come on! Do you your best. You can do it!’. Will such words actually help you do your best? And what if she says: ‘There’s only 200 meters to go. You can do it!’  Being specific and measurable is such a slave driver.

3. Managing time

There is one resource that we cannot save. It is time. Managing time is probably not the best way to put it. We cannot manage time as it simply happens to us. What we can do, however, is manage our activities. To be effective, we need to give time to achieving our goals and less time to routine. Managing time is connected with the first two points: get the priorities and the goals right, and allocate time to pursue them.

4. Managing money

The best thing about money is that you can save it. You can accumulate it. You can use it to help you achieve your goals. Not having enough money is bad. Impulse spending is the real evil. If you watch and plan your expenses, you will be a happier person in the end. Saving for the contingencies & important things is the way to go.

5. Managing emotions & stress

If you strive for personal effectiveness, you have to learn to deal with stress. It is important to learn to relax. To do sports. A cool thing is to create positive experiences for yourself: rewarding yourself for a job well done or a goal achieved.

Our happiness in many cases depends on our relations with other people. Relationships are easier to build if you are open, sincere and helpful. Leading a social life has been shown to give fairly positive results. Give it a try

6. Managing Health

Good life has to be long. To make sure we have enough time to reach our goals, we have to stay healthy. It means good dieting, regular medical examinations and physical activities.

7. Hard work.

Personall effectiveness means nothing if it is not used. To achieve results, we have to work and work a lot. The hard work should be also smart work: it makes sense to focus on the most important goals and priorities and achieve success there. Spreading thin is stupid & ineffective. Going too narrow will make us overspecialized and less prepaired to change. Hence, the balance has to be found somewhere.

There thousands of books about each of those elements. Probably, you could add something else to the list, or formulate something differently. However, keeping those 7 in mind seems to be working for me. At least to a certain extent.

1. Read romantic poems with your partner. It provides intimacy and does not require poem writing skills.
2. Write a short poem. After all, a good poem is words that come from your heart. If you have a heart, you can squeeze these few words out with some effort.
3. Write a romantic letter. You can even do it every day. If you do, use different words each time.
4. Dance in the rain. Move to rhythm of the raindrops.
5. Speak of your affection in public.
6. Create a photo gallery of your relationship. Add notes and descriptions to every prominent moment.
7. Go on a date once a week.
8. Slow dance to your partner’s favorite slow song.
9. Feed each other strawberries.
10. Cook a pie together.

There is a curious article on installing processes in life to help you manage it better. The author claims that by installing “processes” for routine tasks we become happier and more organized. If a cleaner does each cleaning as a new job, an “uncluterer” puts a process in place that makes doing the task easy, specific and simple.

My first impression after reading the article was positive. After all, more organization in life sounds like fun. I myself have some issues with cleaning & doing the laundry. I caught myself on the second thought, however. Do these processes make us more automated and less human?

There is place for beauty and creativity in everything we do. Even routine tasks can be made less routine with a touch of imagination. Doing the laundry you may imagine a renewal of personal image. Cleaning the room you can think of changing your life for the better. Managing papers on your desk you can rethink the business strategy. I am not so sure if this imagination thing works when you automate these tasks.

Certainly, if the sole criteria of whether to be a cleaner or an “unclutterer” is how many days per month your living space is neat and tidy, you have to try both and see for yourself. I would go for the cleaner, though. Too much of organization makes me think I’m less of a person and more of a machine with a program in place. What about you?

I run a web design company. Like most service companies, we are selling hours of our employees. The more hours are billed to the client, the better well off we are. The problem with graphic design and programming is that it is not always easy to assess the ratio of quality vs. speed and thus to say if a person is performing poorly, adequately or superbly this month.

At first, when the company was very young, there was a lot of motivation that drove everyone forward. However, with time everyone started to get more experience and demonstrate less enthusiasm for the job itself.

The question of motivation at work has been around for a couple of months. I thought of various employee motivation programs that would connect the quality with speed. However, these techniques turned to be a bit too complex to manage and to explain. One more problem is that we do not have a lot of money to pay out as bonuses.

As the result, the work of each person in our 11-man team was evaluated subjectively and did not always help the person chart their professional progress.

Last month an old University friend of mine who now works for a consulting company in the US came back to Belarus. In his company they introduced time utilization principle. It is all very simple. To find time utilization of your employees you have to divide the hours of their work that were billed to clients by the total hours they worked that month. For example, if your clients paid for 100 hours of the project work and the project took 200 hours, time utilization is 100/200=50%.

We calculated utilization for older projects and the figures were not so good for many employees. One of the reasons for that was not only poor work, but also poor time estimation, i.e. for how many hours the client was charged initially.

Time Utilization and Employee Motivation at Work

A week ago we had a discussion with everyone about time utilization and how the efficiency of work is going to be evaluated. It concerns not only the actual hours, but also the accuracy of estimates that go into invoices.

All employees are going to know their time utilization percentage. For each employee we are setting a realistic goal for improving the result. We can measure the progress in percentage points, which quite easy to understand and is very convenient and should help employee motivation as well.

No monetary incentives are planned for the first couple of months as we would like to receive initial feedback from everybody and take care of possible problem areas. For the future, I would like to have 80% time utilization for all employees. Money and other bonuses are going to be used to boost motivation at work to achieve this figure.

Certainly, time utilization principle is not a cure-all pill for improving intrinsic motivation of employees. What I like about it is simplicity and close ties of each person’s time utilization to the company’s bottom line.

Need to learn to stay away from chocolate? Would like to burn a few pounds? Oh, come on. You need some motivation.

When you are fat, you start getting into problems: health, making new friends, finding a girlfriend or just the motivation to exercise. There is no easy way out of it. However, if you set realistic measurable goals, you can see your life change in a couple of months.

Option 1: Add some action.

You do not have to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. If your life is pretty much the same routine, add something with physical activity into it. It could be sex, of course. It could be ice skating or jogging or even taking a walk to the bus stop instead of using your car.

Option 2: Set a measurable goal.

It helps if you know exactly how much you must do and why you do it. Besides, measuring progress can be very motivating. Tell yourself how much weight you would live to lose and over what period of time. Make sure it’s realistic. Losing 50 pounds in one week is a hell of a problem. Check progress regulary and praise yourself on good results with … no, not chocolate. With more exercise

Option 3: Ask a friend to help.

We perform better when someone is watching. Pick a friend and ask them to help you with your motivation. You could go to gym together. Working out together is fun and you have fewer reasons to skip training.

Option 4: Stay big and happy

Language is fascinating. The possibilities of expressing yourself in English are almost limitless. When you write, the richness of this language permits you to be as specific or vague as you wish. You can be subtle and soft or direct and firm. Through your selection and placement of words, you can express anything imaginable. Although English arms you with powerful options, many people choose to sound formal and businesslike. This often translates to stuffy and cluttered. So much of business writing today is ineffective, not to mention boring.

What does this business sentence mean:

Initially, in the lieu of other implementation, manual entry for data input will be requested to accomplish this function.

Translation: In the meantime, we’ll have to do it by hand. Is this translation too informal for business? Is it unprofessional to use plain words? Certainly not.

You can’t accomplish your goals if your reader doesn’t now what you are saying. Simple, straightforward language is the best for most occasions. Simple language communicates. Short words and sentences are easier to write and easier to read. Uncomplicated language takes less time to use and takes up less space. You save time. Your reader saves time. Simple language is never out of place. It’s not presumptuous. It fits in.

Don’t misunderstand the term simple. Simple language is not unsophisticated. It is not undramatic. Short sentences can be powerful. Short sentences attract attention. They communicate quickly, a valuable business attribute. When you write in uncomplicated language, you place the emphasis of what you’re saying on your subject, not on the words themselves. Simple language will contribute to your success for the same reason that cluttered, cloudy words can keep you from moving ahead.

Today’s business language suffers from inflation, not the monetary form, but an overabundance of words. There’re more words being used, but each carries less weight. You can’t say what you mean if one of your primary purposes is to use as many words as possible.

To avoid inflation, put your thoughts in as few words as possible. Using common, rather than ponderous, six-syllable office words will make people respond.

Some examples of when simple words work better:

terminate - end
so as to - to
in a timely manner - on time
to facilitate initiation - to help start
in view of the fact that - because
a small number of - few
in the immediate vicinity of - near

Some more examples:

We are indeed gratified you have expressed your confidence in us in this way.

Translation: We’re glad you are pleased.

Many of these common problems that frequently occur could probably be eliminated or at least reduced if more time was spent to locate qualified personnel for positions on the faculty.

Translation: These problems can be reduced if we find qualified instructors.

Congratulations:
On behalf of your loyal employees here in the engineering department may I most sincerely congratulate you on your new assignment.
-or-
Congratulations! Everyone in engineering sends you best wishes.
We’re proud of you!

Technical, complex language also has a place. But understanding is still the goal.

There’re some situations when you just want to confuse your reader. Perhaps you want to avoid committing yourself to a controversial issue. If you want to confuse, boggle , dumbfound , and otherwise deliver your reader into bewilderment intentionally, you have plenty of options. Many politicians are adept at using abundance of words to say little. You can too, but be sure that’s your intention.

Although your words may not get you what you want 100% of the time, by using words that your reader(s) understand, you can at least be sure everyone knows what you want.

Taken form:
Mark S. Bacon, Write Like The Pros, © 1988, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Used without permission.

The existence of such a thing as the national character can hardly be denied. And there are grounds for People that have some common distinguishing features among representatives of any nationality. We often hear that the British are reserved, the Germans are very punctual, the French are romantic, etc. Probably, there are some other things that are reflected in the national character. Many people agree that the way of expressing different feelings and having various experiences, such as friendship, may be among these national characteristics.

Before we actually look at peculiarities of how people from different countries deal with friendship, it is important to clear out what friendship is. In general a friendship is a relationship between two or more people who know well and like each other. This relationship and liking may range from just a good acquaintanceship to genuine intimacy.

Sometimes not everything goes well when strangers meet. The reason for that is probably not a lack of appreciation of friendship but different expectations about what constitutes a friendship and how it comes into being. This is especially true about people from different countries.

For example, for Germans the basis of a friendship is the mutuality of feeling. Deep disagreement or any subject that matters to both is regarded as a tragedy. Ties of friendship are very binding. Young Germans who come to the US have great difficulty in establishing such friendships with Americans. The latter feel friendships subject to changes and intensity; as people move, change their jobs, marry they will discover a new interest.

English friendships form still a different pattern. Their basis is shared activity. Activities maybe of very different kinds, in which people fall into step, discover some common interest and experience the kind of easy anticipation that draws them together. Sometimes two men or two women, sometimes two couples sometimes three people become lifetime friends.

For the French, though, friendship is a one-to-one relationship that demands a keen awareness of the other person’s intellect, temperament and particular interests. Different friends fill different niches in each other’s life. A person may play chess with a friend for 30 years, and yet know nothing of his or her political views or they can discuss politics and be unaware of what their friend’s personal life is like.

Nevertheless, I would consider these peculiarities to be fairy relative. Yes, people have one another’s friendship in a kind of a similar way. The fact is, however, that like every feeling or emotion, friendship is experienced individually which makes it in each case unique and typical only of this particular person.

These things have been inspired by some old English text when I was a university student quite a few years ago:)

One father wanted to save his daughter from all the dangers of life. When there came a time for her beauty to bloom like a flower, he took his daughter aside to tell her about the villainy and guile of life. “My dear daughter, think carefully about what I have to say. You must know that all men want just one thing. They are sinuous and scheming and they lay traps wherever they can. You won’t even notice that you are sodden in the mire of their salacity . I want to show you the way that leads to misery.

At first a man admires your stature and worships your personality. Then he asks you to go out for a walk with him. Then you go near his house and he tells you that he wants to go in to take his coat. He asks you if you’d like to enter the flat with him. There he offers you a seat and some tea. Together you listen to music, and after a short while he’ll suddenly jump at you. You are dishonoured, your mother and I are dishonoured, our all family is dishonoured and our good name is spattered forever.”

The daughter took her father’s words to heart. And so, one day she came up to the father smiling proudly. “You must be a prophet, Father. How could you have known? It happened exactly the way you told me.

At first he admired my beauty. Then he asked me to go for a walk with him. As if by chance, we were walking near his house. My beloved noticed that he left his coat at home and so not to leave me alone, he asked me to go with him into his flat. Being courteous he offered me to drink some tea and we had a lovely time listening to wonderful music. Here I recalled your words, so I knew exactly what was going to happen, but you will see that I’m a worthy daughter of yours. When I felt that very moment was approaching, I jumped at him and dishonoured him, his parents, his family and his good name!’

1. People are consistent. If the person cheats on others, they will cheat on you. If somebody gossips to you, they will gossip about you. If you have a good friend, no matter what happens they are likely to stay with you.

2. Work to live, not the other way around. If all you do is work, you are either a great artist who’s driven by passion, or a stupid person who robs himself or herself of many pleasures of life. Life can be more fun then just work and money. It is new stuff that matters: emotions, relationships, experiences. Even money is only as good, as the number of emotions it can buy.

3. Don’t try to motivate everyone. A crazy motive, right? There are people who are lazy. There are people who are different. Do not waste yourself on them. There are others you can help. If you want everyone to like you, you are easy to manipulate. Choose the right people and be rewarded with the right attitude.

4. You’ll always be you, no matter what you do. Pretending is fine in the short term. But in the end its best to find the person who will think that the sun shines out of your ass and loves you for what you are.

5. 80% of things you do does not matter much. It is 20% that matters. Each day we waste more than 19 hours of time. At most, you’ll have 4-5 hours to do something meaningful, important, useful. Make sure you do it. Every day.