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HOW TO MOTIVATE YOUR EMPLOYEES

You hire and train employees to work for you. But you are all too often disappointed with the results. You select the best available people (even follow our advice on hiring - see Chapter 2) and you give them the best training (again you even follow our advice - see Chapter 4). Yet the people who work for you don't seem to care as much - aren't committed as much - to the success of your business as you are. Can they ever really care about the success of the business the way you do?  Why can't they invest as much energy in serving your customers as they do in making personal phone calls on the job - while your customers wait? Why can't they do the job right the first time without you having to be there to watch everything they do? Why can't they just come to work on time? Why is it that they just don't seem to give a damn about how the job gets done or even if it does get done?

Unfortunately, your encounters with uncaring and uncommitted employees are not unusual. Practically every manager in every type of business, large and small, has faced the same frustrations you have faced in motivating people. Fortunately, the problem is so common that a lot of research has been conducted on why it occurs and, more important, what you as a manager can do about it.  In summary, what we now know is that motivating people is as simple - and as complicated - as knowing and applying the ABCs.  The ABCs that are the secret to motivating employees are not the ABCs of school.  They are the ABCs of psychology.  

"A" stands for Antecedent - what gets behavior started.
"B" stands for Behavior - what people say or do.
"C" stands for Consequences - what happens to people as a result of what they say or do.

The ABC model for understanding employee motivation is based upon the well-established principle of psychology that behavior (what people say or do) is strongly influenced by the consequences of that behavior (what happens to them as a result of the behavior). An antecedent (prompt, request, suggestion, demand, order, etc.) is necessary to get behavior started (to get people to do what you want them to do), but it is not enough to keep the behavior going (to keep them doing what you want then to do).  If you want to keep people motivated, you have to provide consequences.  

When your employees aren't doing what you want them to do, a place to start is to check and see how recently you have provided an antecedent. John is making too many personal phone calls on company time. Have you explained the company policy about personal phone calls to John? Mary has been coming late to work.  Have you mentioned her tardiness and made your expectations clear to her? Explaining company policy, pointing out expectations, making sure that employees understand the rules of behavior - these are antecedents. They will help you get the right behavior started. They will help you "motivate" your people.

As surprising as it might be, employees might appear to be unmotivated when the problem really is that they don't know the correct behavior. No one has told them what is expected, or it has been so long since they were reminded that expectations have become fuzzy. A situation with one of our clients illustrates the type of motivation problem. Employees performed manual labor at this location where their hands, arms, and faces would become coated with grease and grime during the course of the workday.  Company policy allowed employees to quit work fifteen minutes early each day to clean up before departing for home. Over a period of time, the fifteen minute early quitting had stretched to thirty minutes for many employees and to as much as forty-five minutes for some.  Individual employees were repeatedly berated by their supervisors for "sneaking off" early, to no avail. Eventually, all employees were brought together in a group meeting where the written company policy was read and distributed.  Employees responded that "they had never seen a written policy" and that, anyway, they understood that the unwritten policy was "you could take time at the end of the day to clean up and everybody always took a half hour or so." The immediate result of this meeting was that employees returned to taking only the approved fifteen minutes.  The antecedent worked - at least initially.

Antecedents do work to get behavior started (or restarted as in the quitting-time example). The problem with antecedents is that they don't work over the long-haul. It is the old story of "I tell them and tell them, but it doesn't do any good." That's where consequences come into play - the "C" part of the ABC motivation model.  

Consequences - particularly positive consequences - sustain behavior over the long term. The effective use of positive consequences is the real secret to creating and maintaining a motivated work force. Also, using consequences is a much more effective and efficient means of motivating work behavior. Using antecedents is like using a starter to get a motor running. But you wouldn't want to have to depend upon the starter to keep the motor running.  You would soon wear out the starter. Rather, you want the motor to keep running by itself as long as you give it enough fuel. Providing consequences to your employees is like providing fuel to a motor - your employees (once started) will run fine on their own as long as you are supplying the "fuel" they need.

Consequences (the "fuel" of motivation) come in two varieties - positive and negative. Positive consequences are the "good" things that happen to people as a result of their work behavior - the rewards and recognition for good performance. Negative consequences are the "bad" things that happen - the punishment for poor performance. Volumes of research have shown that the provision of positive consequences is the most effective means of creating a motivated work force. In fact, there is clear evidence to indicate that it is almost impossible to create a motivated work force through the use of negative consequences (punishment) alone. Yet negative consequences (punishment or the threat of punishment) are most often used to correct problem behavior or try to motivate employees to exhibit the right behavior. Since punishment is so commonly used and so frequently fails to get us what we want, we will spend a moment discussing the problems with using punishment before turning to the more effective technique - rewards and reinforcement.

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