Every successful team must have a group of outstanding employees. The quality and passion of employees are the fundamental driving force for the advancement of an enterprise. Employee motivation is the engine of the power source and the magic weapon for the long-term prosperity of an enterprise. Only managers who are good at motivation can create employees like “thousand-mile horses”.
1. Self-realization: The most effective motivation comes from everyone’s heart
Self-realization refers to the process in which an individual’s various talents and potentials are fully developed in a suitable social environment to realize personal ideals and ambitions. It also refers to the state in which an individual’s physical and mental potential is fully developed. American psychologist Maslow believes that this is an individual’s personality tendency to pursue the highest achievement in the future, and it is the highest level of human needs. In addition to a sense of belonging and respect, what other motivations do employees need in their hearts? The need for self-realization. Self-realization is the sense of accomplishment gained from helping others, and it is the recognition and appreciation of self-worth.
Case 10-17
One day, Han Meimei and Li Lei walked into a clothing store equipped with artificial intelligence cameras and membership systems produced by their company, and pretended to ask casually: “This thing is interesting, is it useful?” The clothing store employee said: “It’s OK.”
Li Lei couldn’t help asking: “What do you mean by ‘OK’?”
The clothing store employee said: “The camera was installed at a wrong angle, and many of the faces were captured in profile, and some could not be recognized; the ones that could be recognized were slow to respond, and it took 1 to 2 minutes to give me information, and the customer had already walked around and left.”
Li Lei asked: “These problems can be solved! Did you give feedback when they called back?”
The clothing store employee said: “The salesperson repeatedly said that you must give a good review, otherwise your bonus will be deducted, and asked you to contact him directly if you have any questions, and not to call customer service.”
Li Lei was struck by lightning when he heard this. Back at the company, Han Meimei said to Li Lei: “That’s why I want to go to meet clients with you. Our company already has more than 1,000 people, some are diligent, some are lazy; some are rigorous, some are loose, and management is becoming more and more complicated. No result can be simply attributed to a problem; nor can any system exhaust all the execution details. Loopholes are endless. At this time, the ‘technology of motivation’ is no longer enough, and the ‘art of motivation’ must be used. Starting from the source of everything, let employees feel a sense of accomplishment for ‘customer success’, and then use this sense of accomplishment to guide every work detail, so as to avoid the loophole of ‘perfect indicators, complaining customers’ from happening again.”
Han Meimei asked the public relations department to carefully plan a video. After several polishings, it was played at the quarterly staff meeting: A mother with two babies gets up before dawn, makes breakfast for her children, and then reluctantly says goodbye to open the clothing store! Business. After standing for a day, my back and waist ache. At this time, a customer came in. The system accurately identified the customer’s needs. The mother recommended a skirt that the customer liked very much. The customer was very happy, and the mother was also very happy. At 7 o’clock in the evening, the sales commission had been deposited into the mother’s account through the membership system. She passed by a toy store for the eighth time on her way home and finally bought the toy that her child had always wanted. When she got home, the two babies rushed over together, and the happy smile on the mother’s face diluted all the fatigue…
After watching this video, all employees were quiet for a while. Many employees with children had some tears in their eyes, and many engineers working in the office knew for the first time that they could help an ordinary person so truly. Then, there was a long applause at the scene.
Han Meimei did not use “technical means” to continue to find loopholes in the process, because the loopholes in the process could not be filled. She used “artistic means” to find the loopholes in the hearts of employees and filled the loopholes with the sense of accomplishment brought by helping others. This is the highest realm of motivation: self-realization.
In management, process loopholes come and go, and they can never be filled. We can make employees feel the sense of achievement gained from helping others to fill the loopholes in their hearts. We can use videos, pictures or thank-you letters to make employees feel the great value of their work to others.
What is the best way to achieve the best effect? You can regularly select customer letters of praise and send them to all employees, or even post them on the walls of the tea room, so that everyone can feel that our work is not to increase user satisfaction from 75.4% to 81.3%, but to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
You can name the improvements in the efficiency of each process in the company after employees. For example, customer service staff Tang Weiwei has refined a very effective set of words that can quickly calm customers and then help them solve problems. You can name this set of words “Tang Weiwei’s Quick Calming Method”.
You can let colleagues with high professional levels take some apprentices. The apprentices call “Master, Master” all day long. This master will be full of a sense of achievement and responsibility and help new employees grow.
In order to achieve a difficult and significant victory, you can break down the big victory into several small victories. Each small victory can inspire employees’ sense of accomplishment and enhance their self-confidence. “We finally took Dubai!” “We finally took Brazil!” This method of using victory to motivate can greatly satisfy employees’ self-realization.
A sense of belonging can make employees fight for the collective; a sense of respect can make employees fight for trust. No wonder organizational behavior research believes that the most effective motivation comes from everyone’s heart.
Case 10-18
Logistics moves the world, we deliver happiness to you (Logistics moves the world, GAcosco moves the happiness) We mainly do logistics in the five Central Asian countries. These countries are vast and sparsely populated. Cars are a must-have for families. Because the economy is still developing, it is very difficult for many people to buy new cars, so they need to import a large number of old cars, which is a very important type of our transportation category.
Since old cars are prone to problems such as asymmetric center of gravity when loaded into containers, which will bring a lot of operational troubles, I have always “hated” this category. Until one day, I was standing on the streets of Tashkent with a big customer, looking at the old cars shuttling back and forth on the street. He suddenly said with deep affection: “Over the past ten years, the two of us have cooperated to transport hundreds of thousands of cars to this country. Many of these cars running back and forth were transported by us. We have enabled those who originally had no chance to drive a car to drive a car.”
Suddenly, a sense of pride arose. The two of us stood on the street for a long time, watching the cars coming and going, recalling the joy and bitterness of the past ten years, and feeling the value of our work.
The next year, I participated in an exhibition and needed to write a slogan. I blurted out: “Logistics moves the world, we deliver happiness to you (GACOSCO moves the happiness).”
2. Job-embedded incentives
We know many incentives, such as monetary rewards, job promotions, letting employees play the leading role, and even career commitments. What should we do if these methods are ineffective?
(1) Present the honors to employees at their homes.
Case 10-19
A Chinese multinational company, whose main business is the production and sales of heavy machinery, has production bases in Brazil, Germany, the United States, and other countries. The reason why it encounters the problem of failure of traditional incentives is that it needs to hire a large number of foreign employees, and cultural differences sometimes bring unexpected troubles.
This company encountered problems when it built a factory in a certain African country. They made plans for possible obstacles in strategy and marketing, but when they got there, they found that the problems they encountered were much more basic than this. What’s the problem? Going to work on time, getting employees to come to work on time, this can actually be a problem. And don’t underestimate this problem. If one person is missing from the assembly line, the entire machine will not be able to run. The locals have a very poor sense of time. We have been taught to be punctual since we were young, but there is no such tradition in Africa. If you ask to go to work at 8 o’clock, they will give you face if they arrive at 9 o’clock. And after in-depth communication, they found that some workers living in slums have no habit of looking at clocks at all.
What to do? They began to do ideological work, telling the locals that punctuality is a virtue, but no one listened. Another method: give bonuses. It still didn’t work. There are very few local consumption places. After meeting basic needs, the extra income is very unattractive. If you give more, you will lose money in the end. You may say, then just fire them and send us Chinese. Sorry, in order to solve the local employment problem, the African government requires foreign companies to employ a certain proportion of local people. They can’t be fired. What to do?
When this company encounters difficulties, it is particularly willing to believe in solutions with “Chinese characteristics”. The company began to evaluate model workers, once every quarter. Those who came to work on time would be awarded with big awards and big red flowers. But giving money didn’t work, so would giving certificates work? It really worked, because their certificates were not given out casually.
They invited local government leaders to present awards to employees, and sent the certificates to their homes. It was really “gongs and drums were loud! Firecrackers were blasting”, and the team was so powerful that it was going to attract all the villagers. The leaders were also very dramatic. As soon as the parents of the model workers came out of the house, they went up to them and shook their hands: Thank you for giving birth to a good son. Although the people in the same village didn’t know what was written on the certificate, they could all feel that this person must be very powerful, and no one in the village had ever received a government award.
They also put photos of “foreign model workers” on their official website and asked local media to report on them. When interviewed, the “foreign model workers” said to the camera: “I am a model worker”, and you could feel the pride through the screen. The factory also built a Hall of Fame. When local people visit, they will definitely see a large portrait of a model worker with a bright smile. When this system was first implemented, few people could meet the standards, but the company insisted on evaluating them. After a period of time, more people met the standards. In 2018, relying on the model worker system, the company basically solved the problems of absenteeism and lateness.
(2) Understanding of “work embedding”.
No one stipulates that organizations can only trade with individuals within the scope of work. When you step out of the workplace and enter his life, there are many problems you can help him solve. Aren’t these all cards that the organization can play? With this awareness, let’s look at the case again. The key is not the award certificate, not the honor itself, but the process of awarding the honor, which happens to improve the social status of employees. Whether it is a rural area in Africa or a modern residential area, they are essentially groups formed by interconnected people and the scope of activities of this group. Sociology has given it a name, called “community”. The life of each of us is composed of three parts: community, family, and work. Can organizations use employees’ community and family needs as leverage to motivate employees? Of course they can. Organizations and employees are engaging in invisible exchanges of interests outside the work environment. Organizations have extended their influence beyond the boundaries of their original jurisdiction to employees’ communities and families, bringing them additional benefits. This is the theory of “job embeddedness.”
In the above case, the company did not pay much on the surface. It just printed a few more sheets of paper, invited some leaders, and smoothed the relationship with the TV station. But the effect it produced was huge. The sense of honor it brought to employees, after being magnified by the social network, is probably something that even doubling the salary at work cannot achieve.
“Job embeddedness” brings at least three insights to companies: Motivation is not limited to work factors, non-work factors also play an important role: For individuals, the two most important non-work factors are community and family factors: You can incorporate non-work factors into the design of incentive policies.
(3) Build an external network for employees. Case 10-20
The multinational company in Case 10-19 encountered the problem of “poaching” when building a research institute in Germany, which was also full of disasters. The company had just gone abroad and was not well-known at that time. The German engineer said: Your company is too small and cannot meet my development needs. But for Chinese companies at that time, the difference was in technology. Talent is priceless and must be poached. Their initial approach was simple and crude: spending money. At that time, their competitor was Siemens, so they doubled the amount Siemens offered. As a result, doing so caused even bigger problems. It turned out that Germans had basic expectations for salary. If it exceeded too much, they would think that you didn’t understand the market at all and were not rigorous, and they would look down on you even more.
So they changed their strategy: reasoning. They said that Siemens is a company for middle-aged people, and it would be difficult for you to stand out there. We are a sunrise company with great room for development. But they didn’t listen and didn’t believe that the Chinese could achieve the scale of Siemens. This company particularly likes solutions with “Chinese characteristics”. This time they came up with a “curve to save the country”. Engineers | If they can’t convince, they can also do the work of the engineer’s family. They found the engineer’s wife and asked her to set conditions: How can you help us lobby? This move is really strange, and it’s the right way. Most engineers live in towns and villages, so many wives said, I want to live in Berlin, I want my children to go to school in Berlin, but I don’t know anyone in Berlin, can you help me solve it? They said yes, as long as there are conditions. They really spent a lot of effort to smooth the relationship with the government, find all the friends in Berlin to mobilize resources, find houses and schools. Not only that, they also established a network of relationships for employees’ families covering medical care, education, and social welfare security, and set up a department dedicated to handling family affairs. As long as people have needs, someone will come to take them to handle all matters. It is also a spectacle that Chinese people help Germans solve problems in Germany, but it has achieved results. Although many engineers are not happy, they can’t stand their wives’ nagging and think about their children getting a good education, so they choose to join this company. These talents played an important role in the company’s subsequent establishment in Germany. The boss helped the employees solve the education and pension problems, and the employees helped the boss to get the business done!
If an organization uses non-work factors to motivate employees, where should it start? Organizational behaviorist Holtom conducted a survey on the Fortune 100 companies in the United States and found that those companies with high “job embedding” all provided employees with high-quality external networks, which became an important reason why they were reluctant to leave the company. In fact, the reasoning of Case 10-19 is the same. Isn’t it the relationship between African employees and their neighbors that the company helped them solve?