Employee motivation is the elusive Holy Grail for most businesses. The truth of the matter is most organizations and leaders do not know how to motivate their teams in a consistent fashion. They try to ply people with rewards if they achieve goals, they offer sage advice to try and inspire team members and they try to lead by example. They may see short burst of productivity only to have the team fall right back into their normal routines and level of efforts.

We all think we want to create employee motivation but what we are really talking about is the desire to create employee engagement. You motivate people to excel in short bursts, to overcome challenges or to reach a specific goal but we engage to create a culture that transcends extrinsic motivations. When you nurture and develop trust and passion for the company’s vision and goals, you engage team members based on their intrinsic motivation.

Rewards may be effective in motivating the neighborhood kids to find your missing dog but when it comes to motivating you workforce they fail miserably. In fact, most traditional reward and recognition lead to an overall decrease in employee motivation with “Employee of the Month” programs serving as the poster child. Why? Because the research on which traditional reward and recognition programs are built – operant conditioning – is based on rats running in mazes and we aren’t rats – although we certainly may feel at times as though we are running in a maze! 

Hello again!

We at Kudos have been thinking about this question quite a lot in the past year as we worked to develop the recognition and engagement programs on www.kudosnow.com - so I was interested to listen to Gary Vaynerchuk’s perspective during his recent Webinar given via GoToMeeting Corporate (http://www.gotomeeting.com) on “How to Win in the Thank You Economy?”

Hola!

Here’s a small book I enjoyed: Revved was written by one of the authors of Fish [which we’ve already reviewed], and published in 2006 by McGraw-Hill. Harry Paul & Ross Reck, PhD follow a similar framework for their story using the example of an office worker looking for ways to change her impact on her environment, and with her staff. Whereas Fish focused on motivational principals, Revved moves further along this path with more practical advise, basically distilled down into these three steps:

1.     Win Them Over

2.     Blow Them Away

3.     Keep Them Revved

Hello there,

            A fundamental business principal we believe in here at Kudos is that a happy, engaged, employee makes a better employee, and the consequent workplace becomes a win-win environment, for employee & employer. A classic business book from 2000, Fish!  by Stephen C. Lundin, PhD, Harry Paul and John Christensen [Hyperion Books], builds on this core principal with their “Fish Philosophy” outlined in four basic concepts:

Hello there,

Hello there,

            For those of you unable to attend the recent Webinar hosted by David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Network, http://employeeengagement.ning.com/video/employee-engagement-on-the-go- on July 19th with Michael Kroth, co-author of the timely and serendipitous book: Managing the Mobile Workforce, http://www.managingthemobileworkforce.com/ Please have a read-through of my quick run-down of some highlights:

One of the books that has fundamentally inspired the Kudos team is First, Break All the Rules – What the World’s Greatest Managers do Differently [1999, Simon & Schuster], by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman from the Gallup Organization. The authors conducted an in-depth research study involving +80K managers across NA in various industries, trying to determine how the best managers find, keep and nurture the best talent? They also wanted to formulate a measure for employee satisfaction/engagement – and they began with this question:

“Wouldn’t it be great, if at work at least, we didn’t have to confront our insecurities on a daily basis?”

I’m not sure if everyone is aware how much the idea (+ the pursuit) of happiness is most definitely in the air as part of the zeitgeist of the moment, and how exactly Kudos fits so seamlessly into this narrative:

In my first blog post introducing Daniel Pink’s book Drive, I outlined the basic core of its motivational principles. Today, I’d like to retrace the basics of Motivation 2.0 (M2):

Drive is a great read that promotes a fresh perspective on how to practice business in this new Millennium that is more humanistic, while remaining profitable. The Drive philosophy is grounded in Motivation Theory, and moves beyond the dated robotic focus on Rewards & Recognition, i.e. the “carrots & sticks” approach to human motivation, which Mr. Pink refers to as Motivation 2.0.

For those of you unable to attend the Webinar hosted by Rypple, with Mr. Daniel Pink live, following here is a quick update of events for your feedback & review:

Kudos is a simple & cost effective peer-to-peer recognition and communication system that can be employed by any size organization as a foundation and holistic approach to Employee Engagement.

I have run many companies over the years and the one common thing between them all was the need to engage the team to maximize performance and as a result the bottom-line. In each company we worked hard to articulate the vision and objectives so the team understood the big picture and what their role was in achieving our common goals. It did not matter if it was a manufacturing operation or a consulting company – the team members were looking to the leadership for purpose and direction.

For those of you unable to attend the HubSpot Webinar, hosted by Dan Zarella, Inbound Social Media Scientist (@HubSpot), following here is a quick update of events for your feedback & review: