Mastering Employee Motivation

Motivating Employees: Importance of Clear Expectations, Tracking Performance, and Measuring Important Outcomes

• A manager's key responsibility is to motivate employees, obtain consistent performance, and help them continuously improve.
• The primary cause of subpar performance is a lack of clear understanding of management's expectations.
• Clear and consistent communication of goals, objectives, and priorities of each employee, job, and organization is essential.
• The goals and objectives must be reasonable and achievable, otherwise, they can become morale breakers.
• Tracking performance on an ongoing basis is essential to keep employees focused and motivated towards achieving the goals.
• Breaking down big goals into subgoals reduces anxiety and makes the task less overwhelming.
• Measuring what is important makes tracking and motivating employee performance easier.
• The data that is measured and reported must be closely aligned with the core responsibilities of the job and organizational priorities.
• Measuring and managing solely based on easily measurable data is a huge mistake as it cannot measure every important part of an employee's total job responsibilities.
• Setting clear goals and expectations, managing with data, and drawing a clear connection between performance objectives and actual performance makes the process of employee evaluation more valuable.
• Measuring and rewarding what management really values positively influences employees' thoughts and actions.
• The shift of focus from overemphasizing one measure to another helped a dealership with the lowest customer satisfaction ratings in the entire region to become the first in less than two years.

Employee Performance Evaluations and Compensation

• Conducting semiannual or annual formal evaluations is important for both employees and supervisors to know where they stand.

• Evaluations should be balanced and address both positive and negative behaviors and instances.

• Beginning with praise for the best efforts of the past year is important, especially when evaluating someone who is experiencing serious performance problems.

• Evaluations should provide a review of the period for each of the important performance criteria for the employee, using a standard format.

• The annual evaluation should be a comfortable situation but provide enough structure to ensure it does not become a conversation with no specific point or outcome.

• A prewritten evaluation instrument that covers a broad range of general criteria ensures consistency and covers the full scope of job knowledge, skills, and abilities.

• The total compensation plan is a combination of all the pay and benefits that are received.

• Changes in pay rates or performance bonuses are commonly tied to the employee evaluation process.

• Care should be taken to avoid positive evaluations with no reward and pay raises across the board that are unrelated to performance.

• The across-the-board raise sends a mixed message to employees and should be avoided.

• Incentives are short-term benefits or bonuses that are tied to specific performance within a limited period.

• Incentives can be an effective part of a long-term improvement strategy to stimulate and increase performance levels.Using Incentives to Motivate Employees: Tying Performance to Compensation

• Incentives can be effective in motivating employees to improve performance, but they must be fair and equitable to avoid complaints of favoritism or cheating.

• When trying to increase labor hours per repair order, it may be helpful to incentivize employees to make additional sales recommendations.

• Incentives should be aligned with the goals and objectives of the job in order to reward the exact performance that is most important.

• A compensation plan serves as a constant reminder of organizational goals and objectives and communicates them to employees.

• Compensation plans should be designed to reward the performance that is valued most, whether it is production or quality.

• Rewarding what is valued can lead to a dramatic improvement in performance, as seen in the example of a dealership that refocused on quality and improved customer satisfaction.

• Incentives should be carefully considered and tailored to the specific job and employees in order to be effective.

• Tying compensation to performance can improve employee morale and motivation.

• A compensation plan that is not aligned with organizational goals and priorities can reduce employee morale rather than improve it.

• Employees must be confident that incentives are fair and equitable in order for them to be effective.

• Failure to align incentives with goals and priorities can result in complaints of favoritism and cheating.

• A compensation plan should be a constant reminder to employees of what is valued and what is expected of them.