Employees Want To Be Valued, It’s Not Always About Money
Key insights on what motivates employees beyond monetary awards
Editor’s note: this is part one of a two-part series.
Setting up and operating a small business that financially supports the owner is itself an accomplishment.
Building an operation that can support additional employees can be another level of accomplishment for many business owners.
Additional employees can offer your business the benefit of providing helping hands that enables growth, but it also brings new challenges and another level of leadership stress. When you have employees you not only need to navigate the logistics and administration of hiring, training, evaluating and paying you also need to ensure your employees are contributing, remain motivated and engaged so they can make a positive contribution to their business.
It can become a trap for a small business owner to get caught in the thinking that if you are consistently paying your employees fair wages your employees will work hard. To sustain performance over time people, need to remain motivated and motivations change.
A disheartening reality
For some business owners it can be disheartening to struggle to bring in enough money to pay your employees only to turn around and learn that their wages are no longer enough to keep them satisfied.
While your employees wish to be paid a fair wage after a time wages alone can decrease as a motivator. I have worked with business owners who have said that if their employees are no longer satisfied with their wages they are welcome to leave.
However, it is in our nature that when we become acclimatized to receiving a benefit that benefit needs to be increased or changed to maintain the same psychological impact. People remain complex and our needs change. In times of famine what tastes good to eat may not be what tastes good to eat in times of bounty.
As a leader of an organization understanding how to meet the changing motivational needs of your employees can be the ticket you need to sustain a productive workforce.
It’s not about the money.
It would be inaccurate to say that wages are not important to most employees. Most people certainly want to be paid for their time and paid appropriately with a fair wage. However, even people who appear highly motivated by money are not completely motivated by the money, often they are motivated by what the money can provide.
It is not always easy to clarify what motivates people, in fact people don’t always fully understand their own motivations.
While the definition of motivation is simple enough understanding it is more complex. Motivation is the reason(s) we have for acting or behaving in a particular way and those reasons can remain complex and even elusive. To be motivated for something indicates one has a general desire or willingness to do something to obtain something.
This “desire” or “willingness” is fueled by many intertwined elements that include biological, emotional, social, and cognitive forces that activate our behaviors. The reasons behind motivation can come from within, intrinsic or from outside, extrinsic.
An internal motivation might be your need to obtain food or feel love and an external motivating factor might be your need to avoid a threat. You may be familiar with the famous Maslow’s Theory of a Hierarch of Needs.
These three hierarchies of needs are relevant to understanding your employee’s motivations.
1. Hierarchy of Basic Needs:
At the bottom of this hierarchy are basic needs for physical and biological survival and safety. Providing your employees with fair wages and a safe working environment is one way you can contribute to their ability to satisfy these needs. However, challenges outside of your workplace play significant roles in meeting basic needs. By paying attention to employee’s circumstances, you can offer supports that help them meet their needs in addition to what you can directly provide. For example, providing access to financial management counseling, or health and wellness programs can help employees meet their basic needs.
2. Hierarchy of Mid-Tier Needs:
Employees are also motivated by a need to feel a connection to other people and feel a sense of belonging to something such as a community or group. Taking steps to help your employees feel a part of your workforce can include getting to know them, enabling them to know one another and providing them with opportunities to get to know you and feel aligned with your organization.
3. Hierarchy of Top Tier Needs:
Maslow suggested that we seek to actualize who we are and live in a way where we can focus on achieving our individual human potential. This top need can remain elusive for many of us but when people’s basic needs are met there is an opportunity for people to work to develop their individual potential. Providing employees with opportunities to develop who they are as employees and colleagues and even person can result in more motivated and effective employees.
The process of meeting our needs is not always hierarchical and within these hierarchies there are differences in how people seek to meet a need. You may not be able to meet all your employee’s needs, but you can play a role by creating a workplace that helps your employees work towards meeting their needs.
In part two I’ll cover what you can do to show your employees you value them.
Related content:
7 Rewards for Employees When There Is No More Money
6 Strategies for Motivating Employees
