Dear HR Executive:
What motivates employees to do their best? We recently hosted an audioconference with Dr. Michael Burchell of the Great Places to Work Institute – the organization that compiles the annual rankings for Fortune magazine.
At great companies, Burchell says, people are inspired by their work. They arrive every day energized by what they do and go home knowing that they’ve made a difference.
But motivating employees isn’t a matter of soaring rhetoric, feel-good videos or those often-mocked motivational posters touting Teamwork or Persistence.
Inspiration, Burchell said, “connects the head and the heart and the hands with whatever the work is.” It draws a straight line between what workers do and how that work affects the world.
Show them the end result
Take Medtronic, for example. It manufactures medical devices, and many workers spend their days sealed off in clean rooms, assembling tiny parts into highly complex products. Yes, the work is important. And it has to be done right. But it would be easy for these employees to start thinking that their job is about whatever happens in the clean room.
So a couple of times of the year, management at Medtronic have a unique way of motivating employees. They bring all their employees together and have a patient or physician talk about how those devices impacted their lives. Workers sit face-to-face with people who are alive because of the work they do. And it makes a huge difference. People feel connected. Even though they do a job where they’re focused in little parts that go down a conveyor belt, they can see how it all fits together.
As an HR manager, you can have a big impact on how people feel about their jobs. The question to ask: Can every employee reasonably make a straight-line connection between their work and some tangible metric or outcome that the organization really cares about? You can take steps – like Medtronics’ patient meetings – that help employees gain that line-of-sight. And when they do, they’ll be inspired to do their very best.
Michael Boyette
Editor, HR Café Training Center
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