Our most popular blog posting over the past two months has been a post called “Motivating Your Staff”. In fact, this post has received almost twice as many views as the second most popular post. Our training sessions on motivation over the past several years are always some of the most popular and most requested. Now here’s the interesting thing… on over 95% of our employee engagement surveys the lowest score of all the questions is the score for motivating.
“Have I received recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days”
Think about it, the training that everyone wants is for the area that they score the lowest on. You would think this is a good thing but here’s the deal. Even after doing extensive training and coaching on motivating employees, we still see the motivation question on the engagement survey as the lowest score. Why is that? Here’s a thought. There is no silver bullet for motivating your employees and many managers seem to be looking for the proverbial silver bullet to make up for a lack of active management.
Many managers are still trying to fix employees that are beyond fixing. Many managers are not matching talents to task. Many managers still don’t conduct weekly team meetings and most, by far, won’t have daily one-on-one conversations with their direct reports for reasons we have yet to figure out. So when we get the question on the engagement survey “Have I received recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days” many employees say no. All this question is asking is, “have I received a pat on the back for doing a good job”. Simply recognizing an employee individually and specifically about something she did. It’s free, yet so few managers do it. In the next seven days, what are you going to do about it?
I LOVE TRAINING ON HOW TO MOTIVATE YOUR STAFF. I KNOW HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO GIVE PRAISE FOR A JOB WELL DONE. EVERYONE LIKES TO RECEIVE A PAT ON THE BACK FROM THEIR SUPERVISOR.
DEBRA COBB