Sebastian Perrier

What motivate us as human beings? New esearches suggest that people are guided by four basic emotional needs:

• Obtain: scare goods, including intangibles such as social status.
• Link: form connection with individuals and groups.
• Undersand: satisfy our curiosity and master the world around us.
• Protect: protect against external threats and promote justice.

What should managers do? In practical terms, these findings suggest that for each of the four emotional drivers that employees need to fulfill, managers can utilize a particular organizational tool to motivate them. First, the drive to obtain is most easily satisfied by the organization’s reward system. Second, the drive to link is most easily satisfied by creating a strong sense of camaraderie – create a culture that promotes teamwork, collaboration, openness and friendship. Third, the drive to understand is best addressed by designing jobs that are meaningful, interesting and challenging. Finally, to meet people’s drive to protect managers should rely on designing and implementing transparent processes within their organizations.

To conclude, the secret to catapulting employees’ motivation is to improve its effectiveness in fulfilling all four basic emotional drives, not just one. Each of these drivers is independent; they cannot be ordered hierarchically or substituted one for another. To fully motivate employees, managers must address all four emotional needs.

Reference: Employee Motivation: a powerful new model, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2008

Employees behavior is discretional and cannot be ruled by a contract. In order to influence behavior, attention to employees own interests should be considered. As in any relationship, trust is the basis for good human resources practices. One basic role of the human resources department is to provide the company with the availability and ability of resources in order to accomplish its goals. Anotherone is to manage workforce in-flow, through-flow and out-flow. The procedures and strategies developed in managing this flow should be aligned with the company’s mission, vision, values, strategies and goals. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’, different approaches to human resources management can work for different companies. The important thing to take into consideration is to be consistent. Coherence and consistency are key in sending the right ’signals’ to employees that will determine the overall company’s cognitive framework.

Each organization has its own culture and cognitive frameworks which have been developed through its history. People expectations and perceptions are developed from what the company’s signals are. The correct design of coherent policies and the efficiency and consistency of their application are key in driving people’s behavior within an organization. Human behavior cannot be bought, cannot be driven by power, authority or money; human resources cannot be managed just by ‘numbers’.

Managers should acknowledge that the employee relationship is a conflict between employees and company’s goals. Their role of managers is to ‘manage discontent’; it’s to continuously work on establishing a balance between effort and reward. In this interaction, employees should have a voice. Achieving harmony in employment relationships is not natural or automatic, on the contrary. This relationship needs proactive action to get cooperation from both parties.

Why do people work? If the answer to the question is money, then why would someone with the same pay level will work harder than another? Can motivation be bought? The answer to this question is that there are extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Payment is just one method of extrinsic rewards. There are also intrinsic rewards such as job satisfaction, sense of belonging and influence, sense of accomplishment, share of values, among other. Therefore, motivation which leads to extra-discretional effort cannot simply be empowered with additional pay.

So how important is pay? It is likely to depend on each person. This is relative to their age, qualifications, life-style, likes, culture, nation, etc. But in general, although pay is an important fact it does not have a strong impact on motivation. It is not possible to motivate people just by managing pay related reward systems. People behavior is discretional and how managers try to influence their behavior cannot lead to a standard or automatic process. So managers that try to guide their workforce just by designing reward systems will not achieve the expected result. Designing pay related reward systems is not useful to motivate people, it is a way to being fair to those who outperform for their extraeffort.

There are two steps in designing a reward system. First, what is the fixed salary level. In this aspect, fix salary levels should be enough to recruit, select and retain the employees required for each position. This fixed level should be aligned with internal (peers) and external (market) payment levels. Second, determine a variable pay which rewards effort in a way that is fair to those employees that – having the same skills set and competence than the others – over performed. Variable pay rates should have a clear purpose, which is being fair.

When designing a variable pay system, managers should have into consideration some of the following points:

• Individual or team-based rewards
• How to measure performance (qualitative + quantitative)
• Clear communication
• KISS (keep it simple and stupid)
• Avoid subjective measures
• Employees should have control over the performance measures
• Employees should have the skills, abilities and competences to achieve such goals

The management of human resources flow is about meeting current and future work force requirement while at the same time employees’ career objectives. Note that trying to also meet employees career needs is always forgotten. There are 6 steps in an organization’s human recourses flow:

1. Recruit (marketing of your company)
2. Select (find the fit of candidates to position and organization)
3. Performance evaluation
4. Training
5. Retention (motivation)
6. Redundancies

The first two steps in managing human resources flow is recruiting and selecting employees. This is the process by which organizations solicit, contact and interest potential candidates and then establishes whether or not to appoint any of them. The organization must clearly define what are the requirements for the role in terms of skills and behavior needed. Selecting is about finding a ‘fit’ with the position requirements and with the company’s culture.

But how can organizations find if someone does ‘fit’ or not? There a various different methods to assist the selection process. However, most companies use traditional interviewing. Interviewing has been an abused method in the past, and many companies selected employees only based on interviews. But interviews are in general a subjective judgment selection method. Although interviews are good in order to asses potential match between the candidate and the company’s culture, it does not cover all the areas needed to be assessed. In this sense, a multi-method approach could be better.

The next three step in managing employees flow are: performance evaluation, training and employee retention or motivation. How companies measure employees’ performance? On the one hand, the objective of the company is to influence employees’ behavior towards reaching corporate goals. And on the other hand, the objective of the employee regarding their performance evaluation is to get feedback in order to improve their professional development. Therefore, evaluating employees’ performance should not only include corporate goals, but also employees goals of professional development such as skills gained and peers feedback.

Regarding training what should managers do when new skills are required? One option thay have is to hire those new skills from employees outside the organization; thus not having to internalize the training costs. But what will happen to the remaining staff? If the company decides to fire them, it will be losing a lot of ‘social capital’ or ‘team-work’ developed among the existing work force. The relationships that are built among employees in an organization are a valuable asset for any organization. Trust among employees takes time to develop and mutual obligations that foster better work is created after they have worked together for some time. Therefore, a better option for managers is to internalize training costs in order to capitalize on the company’s social networks.

Regarding employee retention, it is interesting to raise the question: why do people leave? Again, it is not always just about money. People may leave an organization because of job specifications, fit with the company’s culture, personal reasons, external conditions (i.e. economic situation in the country), etc. Because of these factors, it can be argued that it is not really possible to try to retain all employees. So how to retain the employees? Maybe by trying to identify those key employees that the company must retain. So manager should understand what are the company needs and determine which employees to keep. Then, managers must tailor or customize programs to retain those employees for the period of time required.

This is called ‘ job-sculpting’, where managers should understand key employees deeply embedded interests. This is almost a psychological task in which manager should regularly (monthly) talk with employees about their job related interests and professional situation, and then try to adjust their positions as much as possible.