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.