How to motivate and keep good employees in the company?

Hello,

To answer your question regarding how to keep good people in the company, I would say each person has his own criteria to rate a great job. For example, mine are:

• Management – are they ok in terms of management style?
• Team members and work environment – is that
• Career progression – can I have a promotion soon? If not, will this job look good on my CV?
• Money received – important, but not always the most important
• Job nature – is it interesting, is it challenging?
• Company prestige and perks
• Work-life balance

So, as you can see, money and career progression are just parts of the overall equation. And depending where you are with your career and your life, some parts might weight more than others (e.g. once you have a family, work-life balance might be no.1 criteria).

To answer your other question regarding how to motivate employees in a flat organizational structure, I would recommend you do an exercise taken from a book called Management 3.0 (written by Jurgen Appelo).

The exercise I’m talking about is called Moving Motivators. This exercise is really helping in finding out what are the intrinsic motivations that each person in the team has.

In a nutshell, you use a pack of 10 cards, each representing one intrinsic desire which motivates people the most:

• Curiosity – The need to think I have plenty of things to investigate and to think about
• Honour - I feel proud that my personal values are reflected in how I work
• Acceptance – The people around me approve of what I do and who I am
• Mastery – My work challenges my competence but is still within my abilities
• Power- There’s enough room for me to influence what happens around me
• Freedom – I am independent of others with my work and my responsibilities
• Relatedness – I have good social contacts with the people in my work
• Order – There are enough rules and policies for a stable environment
• Goal – My purpose in life is reflected in the work that I do
• Status – My position is good and recognized by the people who work with me

Step 1. Ask what motivates each person

After you have the cards printed (you can use the attached file), you ask each person to place the cards in the order from Left (least important for them) to Right (most important).

Then, each of the team members should get a couple of minutes to explain his choices.

Step 2. Ask how would change affect each person’s motivation

Ask to consider a change in their work like, such as a department transformation, relocation, a new project, etc. If the change is positive, the participants are asked to move the cards upwards, or if the change is negative then downwards. If the change had no effect, the cards should remain in the middle. As in Step 1, ask each participant to explain their results to others.

Overall, this exercise generates a great team discussion and is great to realise similarities and differences in how each team member gets motivated.

And as a last thought, please have in mind this quote from Carl Buehner/Maya Angelou:

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel

Hope this helps.

Mirel

Hello Gergana,

Hello Mirel, 

@Mirel I agree with you and the suggested approach. In order to motivate people you need to understand what people value and how they will make trade-offs between their values.

I would also suggest a test called 'Team Dimensions Profile' to connect people with their preferred role. Because if people do not like what they are doing - they cannot truly be motivated.

TDP divides the team into 5 types of people:

1. Creators- generate new ideas and thrive on innovation
2. Advancers- communicate these new ideas; excellent to generate enthusiasm
3. Refiners - challenge these ideas; they are fact-focused
4. Executors (Implementors)- accomplish the goals and detail-oriented
5. Flexors- see the problem from a different perspective; they are a combination of all previous 4 types.

Another important thing I would suggest is that the managers to seek the best answers from their employees and to bring them along as part of the discovery process.  There is nothing more powerful than the feeling of belonging to a company, problem-solving, creation etc.

The main advantage of working in a group is that in that group you can include all the qualities you need for the job to be done than to search for all those qualities in one person. 

Hope that helps. Let me know if you want additional help offline.

Thank you,

Marieta