My house, my boat, my car: years ago, a commercial summed up what motivates employees: money and status symbols. The spot was hailed as innovative. Today, it would probably miss its point quite a bit. In the past, knowledge meant power. Because before the digital age, it was difficult to share information. There was no e-mail or messenger, and it took time to send documents by post. This gave rise to economic structures in which decisions were made by a few people with knowledge at the top.
The emergence of new motivational factors
A typical way to increase employee motivation is through bonuses or promotions. But is this a contemporary motivational tool? Of course, even in the 21st century, no one says "no" to good pay. More than ever, however, employees also attach importance to a good climate and good working conditions. Various studies show that the atmosphere even trumps money in case of doubt.
There are several reasons for this. The increased mass production of economic goods has led to falling prices in many areas, so that even low-income earners can afford more today. An example from the electronics sector: In the meantime, even young professionals have a company laptop and smartphone as standard. A few years ago, these were reserved for top management.
New values in communication
The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices ultimately contributed to a change in communication: information can now be shared around the clock. The generation of employees up to their early thirties grew up with social media and messengers. Keeping knowledge to herself is alien to her.
In this way, the credo "knowledge is power" was transformed into "sharing is caring".
This change in values has long since arrived in the world of work. The result: a working attitude designed for collaboration and exchange. In addition, new employees are looking for meaning in their work even more than the generations before them: after all, they were shaped by their parents, school and university from an early age to question things critically. Ever better education and training opportunities paved the way for this.
The search for the meaning of work
Like previous generations of employees who hand over their own ideas at the company gate? Today, this is unthinkable. Instead, employees want to be heard and make their personal contribution to the company's success. What motivates them is a workplace culture in which there is an active exchange and cross-departmental work towards a common goal that everyone is convinced of. Or to put it more succinctly: identification creates motivation.
This requires a sense of togetherness, which can be fuelled by the establishment of grassroots democratic processes for the purpose of joint decision-making and cross-level communication on an equal footing. Under these conditions, modern employees feel perceived and valued as an essential part of the organization and are happy to contribute.
Three Strategies to Increase Employee Motivation
1. New Creativity Techniques
Methods such as Design Thinking, in which employees are guided to think the impossible, take this into account, for example. In this context, the manager no longer acts as the prescriber, but as a moderator and mentor within a creative process. The manager provides impulses on how an idea could be thought through. The execution is the responsibility of the team.
Employee barcamps are also a form of joint brainstorming. Here, it is the employee himself who invites experts from different departments to deal with a topic. In small groups, they experiment, tinker and tinker until a result is available.
Companies would do well to get their employees on board as co-creators. In fact, it's the only chance to survive in the fast-paced economy. Markets have never been more fiercely competitive, and competitors have never been swallowed up more quickly by the market competitor as soon as innovative strength or quality declined. Only a reliable innovative strength protects against failure.
2. Feel-good atmosphere in the office
But moving away from old management models is not the only thing that makes up a working environment that motivates employees to go above and beyond. It's also about creating an environment with a feel-good factor: quiet, nicely designed corners where you can exchange ideas over coffee specialties, meeting rooms with state-of-the-art technology that enable smooth work, a workplace that invites creative ideas, stress capsules in which you can retreat during phases of high concentration - these are all examples that help to increase the motivation of employees.
For this reason, more and more employers are employing Feel Good Managers, who day in and day out are concerned with nothing other than making sure that the employees are doing well.
The idea: If you enjoy coming to work as much as possible and are motivated to the tips of your hair, you will do a maximum of good work.
3. Flexible working hours and home office
However, the employee should be free to complete his or her to-do's from home to a certain extent. On the one hand, because creativity cannot be switched on and off according to a fixed schedule. That's why employers of creatives in particular would do well not to let them go into action according to a time clock, but when the ideas are bubbling up.
On the other hand, flexibility in terms of time and location is also becoming more important because the importance of an optimal work-life balance is increasing. One example is allowing employees to meet up with friends in the afternoon or to take care of the children if they log in again in the evening.
In any case, this will probably be a form of work of the future. For the foreseeable future, the number of virtual teams will increase. And this makes it finally obsolete to stick to rigid time models. These would be very bad conditions for a regular exchange with colleagues from overseas or the Far East.
