Analyzing Your Employee Motivation System

To maximize your corporate performance and achieve your strategic objectives, you need your employees to make the right decisions and execute them in the right way (and to perfectly coordinate these decisions and actions vertically and horizontally). To make it happen, you need to motivate your employees in the right way to make them do what you want them to do.

Which in our highly imperfect world of rampant individualism requires development and implementation of a comprehensive, sophisticated and customized employee motivation system (EMS). The system that (1) is customized for each corporate employee and (2) maintains the optimal balance between financial (monetary and non-monetary), functional and emotional components.

Monetary motivation includes salary and various bonuses; for sales personnel it obviously also includes appropriate commissions. Non-monetary (meaning that it does not involved payments to employees) may include compensations for gas, cell phone usage, gym membership paid by the company, etc. It almost always includes health insurance. Emotional compensation may include various corporate commendations and awards (e.g. ‘silver’, ‘gold’ or ‘platinum’ status and the like).

‘Comprehensive’ means that this system must (a) cover all of your employees and (b) that for each employee it must cover all available motivation tools. If your company is a lean one, every one of your employees is important for your corporate performance and thus needs to be properly motivated. If your company is not yet lean, you absolutely have to make it one as it is the absolute must if you want to maximize your corporate performance.

The first obvious requirement for your EMS is that it must be very well-documented. Which means that your EMS description must be comprehensive, well-structured, accurate and up-to-date. Meaning that your declared and actual EMS must match.

The second no less obvious requirement is that it must, indeed, motivate your employees to achieve the optimal values of KPI that they are responsible for. And to make it possible, you must (a) know the needs and desires of your employees and (b) make sure that your EMS matches the needs and desires of every employee of yours. You will also need to know the ‘controls’ of every employee of yours – the ‘buttons’ that need to be ‘pushed’ to make the employee in question do what you want him/her to do.

Clearly, your EMS system must match your fundamental corporate documents – your declaration of corporate identity, corporate mission statement (if you have one), corporate vision statement, your personnel management strategy, your UVP to your employees and your corporate culture. As well as your KEF (especially social and cultural ones and employee compensation trends – both general and industry-specific).

As these factors change – and change frequently – your EMS must quickly and efficiently adapt to these changes. Which requires both a highly qualified EMS management team and a no less highly efficient corporate process.

It goes without saying that your EMS – like any other corporate functional area - must be tightly integrated into your strategic and operational management process.