Motivating employees is one major task that every company needs to face. There are many ideas out there on how exactly to motivate employees. A recent study of 50 Fortune 1000 companies showed that motivation starts really well at the beginning of employment, but rapidly declines after six months of working with their managers. Many books try to tell us that motivation is an art, but a new article says we should approach it as a science to get better results. By using data to analyze employees and offer rewards, employees feel it is more fair and work harder.
Key Takeaways:
- A global survey of more than 50 Fortune 1000 companies and 1.2 million employees showed that in a whopping 85% of organizations — remember, these are some of the best companies in the world — employee motivation declines sharply after people have spent six months with their managers.
- While goal setting is a well-researched technique for driving motivation and performance, it is not as simple as practitioners assume.
- Most managers seem to have a natural proclivity to reward employees who are like them, perhaps as an indirect and legitimate way to admire themselves (a sort of narcissism by proxy).
“However, while the science of motivation is robust and well-established, it is rarely applied to real-world management practices, which tend to be based on managers’ intuition and subjective experience.”
