Motivating Staff Morale - What Managers Ignore

I have been following an interesting debate over assessing motivation of employees, taking place on a social networking forum. These days almost all employers use some form of motivational assessment tools, psychometric tests, etc., to assess how a potential employee or manager’s primary motivation for seeking a job fits into the organisation’s values, culture and mission. However, even after rigourous processes of selection to calibrate the motivation of a new recruit, it is not uncommon to find recruiting managers complaining they don’t know there they went wrong. Or even the new recruit complaining that he/she does not think that they can work long in the organisation.

I have recently spent about two weeks with some highly motivated aid workers in Haiti who are doing their work to help the people affected by the earthquake earlier this year. Having met over a hundred of them, their commitment, mission and motivation to simply help the people left me amazed. These are a bunch of people who aren’t motivated by money or comfort or name and fame. External stimuli are less important to them than what they feel internally – their own sense of achievement, of being of service to people less fortunate than them. And they were working for some of the most amazing organisations on this planet whose record of service to humanity have been unparalleled.

It therefore surprises me to find that even when an individual’s, motivation and values were fully aligned to an organisation’s, after a while, many of the same staff and managers feeling that this wasn’t what they initially started with – the highly motivated individual or the-my-type-of-organisation thinking.

The problem is that during recruitments, both the candidates and recruiters, are looking at what motivate the individual. All the assessment tools and tests are geared towards that. The tools work at the level of conscious choices or patterns we follow. But human minds also work at sub-conscious levels, which sometimes some of us don’t even dig into. Consciously, I may be fully open to receive feedback, positive or negative, from my manager, and subconsciously I feel demotivated when I receive negative feedback from my manager in a certain way. The selection tools put lot of emphasis on what motivates us, but not enough to understand – for both the new staff and the recruiters – what factors could demotivate (i.e., what motivates one ‘away from’ something) an individual. When recruiting, managers look at individual patterns of motivation, but  when dealing with factors that demotivate, the same manager then falls back on organisational (generic, common) approaches to dealing with the individuals – salaries, best practices etc. Managers/organisations simply do not know how to handle individual differences in what keeps one from being demotivated.   

Managing Staff Morale during Organisational Change

Managing change is always a tricky challenge for a leader, whether you are considering a small change to specific processes within the organisation, or an organisation-wide change involving restructuring. It is common for staff and managers to feel insecure and intimidated by any change, no matter how clearly this is articulated by the leadership. If change processes get protracted, this leads loss of staff morale.

Communicating a vision for change is much more than articulating the rationale for it. Logical explanations and fancy PowerPoint presentations do not reassure people’s feelings of insecurity, nor uplift their poor morale. Many organisations, during such periods of change, design incentives and rewards – like tangible rewards for certain achievements, family events for staff, special ‘thank you’ cards – for staff. Good leaders know that even these tangible incentives do not change matters when morale is low, and uncertainty is on the horizon.

Morale is to do with what is called state, i.e., how people feel internally. Think of it like this: some mornings we get up from bed and feel very low - if you ask yourself the reason, there probably isn’t any rational one behind it. The same goes with collective feelings - although consciously people may be 'going along' with the organisation's flow, there may be something that puts people in a 'low state', feeling low in confidence, low energy and low in enthusiasm. To deal with this, you need leaders to understand and acknowledge that low morale is to do with 'state' -- not material benefits -- and this can be addressed by only two things:

(a) showing (not just telling them) people a future state, with illustration and examples and vivid stories of how good or great things will be once the changes happen, stories they can connect to; and

(b) making people visualise what great contribution /role each of the staff will make to move the organisation forward.

Does this mean that each staff need to be reassured that their jobs will not change (or disappear), or that it will be business as usual? Absolutely not. What people value in a change process is that they are not disempowered, personally and professionally. Successful change processes, even when they require painful readjustment, put emphasis on personal growth and learning for staff which strengthens their self-confidence and self-esteem.

In brief, low or high morale is to do with how people feel their life /work is of value to others. Good leaders know how to positively contribute towards making people feel valued and empowered.