Understanding Employee Motivation
While having a coffee with a friend last week we chatted about the usual topic of our work life. Helen is a mid level Event Manager at a well known production company in London. At only 27, she has had great success with her current company over the last four years. She strives to offer her clients focused attention and to produce creative and fresh events. This has led to her being promoted yearly, high customer satisfaction, repeat business and new clients who come specially for her. She is also well respected and liked by her colleagues and bosses. Even though the turn over at her firm was high she herself values her commitment to the company.
In her last quarter Helen billed well beyond her target goal and her manager mentioned that she is ready for her next promotion. She didn’t speak with her boss further but explained to me that not only is she considering turning down the promotion but she feels like she needs to quit.
How is it that from first glance, Helen, who has a great job with engaging work, fair compensation, a rapid line of success and respect from all sides would want to turn down a promotion and even leave the company?
Employee engagement is often discussed from the management and HR perspective but I found this to be an interesting example of what engagement means from the employees’ view. I asked Helen for some more information for this article and she gladly explained the situation in detail.
Each quarter, the event managers have a billing goal based on their level of seniority within the production company. They are encouraged to push their clients to spend more on events in order to match or exceed this. However, Helen has no other external incentive to increase the billings aside from it being part of her job and the promotion that may come.
Event managers do not receive any bonuses, extra time off, perks or other compensation for reaching or exceeding their targets. Last quarter the entire team had worked exhaustibly hard and reached the highest billings in the history of the company. At the next sales meeting, management barely acknowledged this and then quickly moved on to say that the team was off target for next quarter and needed to work harder. You could almost hear the employee moral crash.
Helen just couldn’t imagine working any harder. This sales meeting made her feel that her hard work last quarter wasn’t respected. That the team was just working endlessly without any fair benchmarks for success. This was a strong tipping point for her to considering turning down the promotion and leave the company. Working only for a promotion meant that she’d have higher billing requirements. While this promotion would come with a salary raise, that extra cash just didn’t seem worth the even more taxing effort.
Therefore, this company, by failing in this way, is going to loose a valuable member of their team. Not over low pay or lack of employee development, but over the inability to understand employee motivation.
The core problem is that this company doesn’t understand how people are motivated and has misaligned their’s and their employees’ goals.
People function with a mix of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is internal reasons for doing things such as our core values and our feelings of personal achievement. Extrinsic motivation is what drives us from outside our person such as financial rewards or the threat of getting in trouble.
So far, Helen has stayed with this company and done well thanks to her strong intrinsic motivation. She feels strongly about her personal values of doing a good job, showing her strengths, personal development and achieving a great result. However, her company is failing her in ignoring this and only offering her the extrinsic motivations to keep her job and a promotion when she meets and exceeds her targets.
So what does it mean that her company doesn’t match her motivations? It is reflected by how they set their employee goals. These company goals are only acknowledging her quantitate success and not her qualitative success. Like many people Helen mostly values her qualitative success (making her clients happy, creating innovative events). She also clearly understands her qualitative value as an employee in repeat client business, new client referrals and highly regarded creativity.
Helen and other types of colleagues like her bring in company prestige, long term billings and new loyal client referrals. This company is failing in recognising her significant success in a way that makes sense to her and consequently creating their own losses. By not recognising Helen’s and her colleagues overall achievements, they will loose them. Leading to another significant financial and cultural loss from a high turn over rate.
With adjustments to their employee goal setting, compensation structure, and employee communication style, they would be able to reduce their losses of employee engagement and turn over to increase their qualitative success which directly leads to quantitative billing.
I encourage managers and HR departments to evaluate goals, compensation and communication style to determine if they are adequately respecting the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for their company culture and employees. It is also the responsibility for employees to understand and ask for their managers to respect and represent their motivations.
Each company has its own culture which can also differ greatly between office locations and teams. There is no exact formula for developing employee motivation. This requires dedication, practice and trust in the engaged employee. While companies often hesitate to invest in qualitative benchmarks and remuneration, it might just be one important point that raises your employee engagement, reduces lost employee hours and turn over.
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