What is Employee Motivation?
Employees are the most valuable assets for an organization, their contribution of efforts towards the organization leads to organizational success. The more employee satisfaction, the more organizational productivity. Thus, employee motivation is the art of influencing the employee’s intrinsic behavior towards the achievement of organizational objectives.
Employee motivation is the act of administration giving the employees, what they want to get their work easier within the organizational lines. Motivated employees commit to the organization.
Ways For Improving Employee Motivation
Employees are not one-time used assets. Employee’s needs are changed from time to time, thus they to be motivated regularly.
How to motivate employees in the workplace? Here, we discuss 10 simple tips and ways to improve employee motivation for the success at workplace.
#1 Financial Incentives
Money acts as an employee motivation tool. Money is regarded as a symbol of social prestige, recognition, and achievement in the materialistic world. People satisfy their higher-order needs with money. Wage, salary, profit sharing, leave with pay, medical reimbursement, etc. motivates employees to perform better. This facilitates helps to retain productive employees.
#2 Participation
Participation refers to the involvement of employees in the planning and decision-making process. This helps to fulfill the esteem needs of employees. Participation is one way of developing initiatives among employees.
Employee participation helps management in cost reduction, safety measures, materials handling, and operating methods. Participation encourages brainstorming which helps in developing innovative ideas to solve complex problems.
#3 Delegation of Authority
Delegation of authority is assigning a certain part of work to others and giving them the required authority to perform the assigned task effectively. It helps in developing a feeling of dedication to the work among the subordinates. It helps in the training and development of subordinates. Also, it helps to develop high morale and motivation of lower levels employees or subordinates.
#4 Job Security
Job security implies that employees would continue on the same job in the same organization. They enjoy economic and social security through health and welfare programs, security against sickness, disability, and old-age provisions. Employees will be motivated towards their jobs if they have a feeling of job security and future provision.
#5 Job Enlargement
Job enlargement refers to the mounting complexity of the job. Employees perform the more varied tasks of the same level. It motivates employees by reducing the monotony of repetitiveness in work.
Job enlargement makes opportunities to make use of their minds and makes them able to perform varieties of tasks independently. It helps employees in evaluating their efforts. Jobs can be enlarged in both horizontal and vertical dimensions.
#6 Job Enrichment
Job enrichment refers to the vertical expansion of a job by adding planning and evaluating responsibilities. Employees are empowered to assume some tasks typically done by their managers. It increases freedom, responsibilities, and independence. When the nature of the job is exciting, challenging, and creative, it gives the job holder more decision-making, planning, and controlling power.
#7 Job Rotation
Job rotation is the shifting of an employee from one job to another job. It reduces boredom and disinterest by diversifying the employee’s activities. The basic purpose of job rotation is to increase the skill and knowledge of an employee about related jobs. It helps workers to learn to perform varieties of activities necessary for the unit of works.
#8 Reinforcement
Reinforcement is a powerful tool for employee motivation. A person is motivated when he responds to stimuli with inconsistent patterns of behavior over time. Behaviors that appear to lead to a positive consequence need to be repeated while behavior that leads to negative consequences not to be repeated. Reinforcement can be negative and positive, people’s behavior can be motivated by providing rewards.
#9 Quality of Work Life
Quality of work life is an attempt to develop a formal program to integrate employee needs and well beings to improve productivity. Quality of work-life ensures greater worker empowerment, adequate and fair compensation, safe and healthy working conditions, and a higher level of job satisfaction. It supports the highly democratic treatment of employees at all levels and participates in the decision-making process.
#10 Competition
Last but not least, competition is also an employee motivation tool. Competition is a widely used tool for motivation. Employees in an organization compete with each other to fulfill their ego needs. The person who is considered the best is awarded the popular prize. Competition may be in terms of sales, production, safety measures, and so on.