December 7, 2017 |
The most important asset to any company is its human resource. A well performing workforce can enable your company to be profitable. A non-performing one, in contrast, can cause losses and business failure. To ensure your human capital performs optimally, you must ensure it is well motivated. Knowing whether your employees are motivated can be tricky since it is not easy to measure motivation with statistics and numbers. However, you can employ specific time saving and cost effective tips to help you gather valuable information quickly. Having valuable information about the level of employee motivation when you need it will enable you to deal promptly with any situation that may negatively affect your business.
For your assessment to succeed, you need to define, gather and analyze metrics. This standard measure will help you manage and to assess your performance in the employees’ perspective. Consistency and reliability of metrics will be key to your success. You can use metrics to acquire a benchmark for measuring improvement.
Only select those metrics that will ensure proper management of efficiency and cost effectiveness. ITIL proposes 2 to 5 KPIs per CSF. You will apply ‘leading;’ and ‘lagging’ motivational factors to describe future and past events metric references while comparing with the present. You should check if your survey indicates that motivation in your company is ‘Leading’ to avoid a potentially negative situation. In this case, you may use employee satisfaction metrics to measure your employees’ perception on how the company is treating them.
It is equally important to employ the process diagnostic metrics to understand why your efforts to improve employee satisfaction are failing. You will use these metrics after you have used other metrics such as performance metrics.
You will use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to gauge whether you have been able to motivate your workforce. You will need to measure only the most crucial metrics in order to manage and report them effectively.
You can use key performance indicators to gauge your employees’ motivation. You will have to measure them over time and customize them for each department. You are likely to conduct effective assessment using KPIs if they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based
The use of short surveys can enable you to receive direct feedback immediately. Questionnaires and surveys to your employees or clients can help to determine motivation levels in your employees. It may be more prudent to use a third-party service to get a more accurate description than conducting the survey yourself. Online surveys are also more effective in getting an honest answer than face-to-face interviews are.
Annual reviews and surveys are both ineffective in getting quick and accurate feedback from employees. The number of questions is often too high to elicit a thoughtful or honest response due to time constraints. Instead of asking many questions at once, ask a few relevant questions frequently, analyze the actionable data and execute it. You could divide 50 questions in an annual survey into categories such as transparency, management accessibility, general job satisfaction, and so forth.
Ask questions that inquire about employees’ connection to your corporate culture. For example, you could ask them whether they feel their skills are being utilized efficiently in the company. This makes them feel valued. Consulting companies such as Gallup, BCG and Workify have narrowed down the number and type of questions you should focus on to gauge employee engagement to less than 10.
You could start with the pulse survey, which has ten or less questions. The questions include one or two that you will ask your employees monthly or biweekly. Their precision and quickness make them reliable since you will get regular updates on employee higher order feelings.
On the Likert scale, you could ask questions such as ‘on one to five, do you feel that the team progressed well this week?’ ‘How confident are you that your team will hit its targets?’ It is important to utilize cycles when formulating questions to help you focus on areas where improvement is necessary. Start with a general question and be more specific depending on the response.
Immediate supervisors are likely to feel as though they are engaged in a performance review when they have one-on-one meetings. It is advisable for the upper leadership to talk to the wider team to measure its sentiments about the company. You will have managed to shift from ‘how is the employee performing’ to ‘how is our company performing’. One-on-one meetings will enable you to establish more personal but generic relationships with your supervisors. Your will be able to address departmental performance issues promptly.
During one-on-one meetings, you can reinforce company policy and culture messages effectively as well as get feedback. You may ask questions such as, ‘do you support the change recently implemented’, and ‘how do you think it will it affect the company?’ This is also a time to brainstorm solutions to problems affecting the team, especially if a team member is too withdrawn to contribute within a group.
It is pertinent to use both qualitative and quantitative methods to gather actionable feedback. Quantitative assessment will enable you to use numbers, statistical analysis, experimental design and measurements to interpret data. The deductive nature of quantitative measurement has the potential to generalize the outcome. Conducting traditional research complete with a hypothesis and getting results is not necessary if you need quick quantitative data. Since you will do it on an institutional level, you do not need to have a specific sample size.
The quantitative technique involves tools such as tests, questionnaires and structured interviews. You can use it to assess more organizational needs that are more specific, such as employee performance and motivation. It is imperative to inform your employees when you carry out quantitative assessment to eliminate apathy.
Qualitative assessment approach is interpretive and naturalistic. You may provide a detailed description of the issue of motivation, your workforce and their observed behaviors. You may record direct quotations from your employees about their attitudes, experiences and thoughts. It is narrow in scope, so you will have to collect the data directly. You may use tools such as observations, interviews and focus groups.
The vital contributions that each leader makes are easily identifiable using qualitative measurement. Their leadership is a key factor in executing future interventions that you will decide to adopt. The qualitative assessment can help elucidate a model of departmental leadership for your company. It can also help in suggesting best training and nurturing methods to make them optimally effective at cultivating a positive attitude within their departments.
You can use qualitative data to gather crucial data that will help you formulate a better culture for your company. You can interview the company employees and get their views on what they like or dislike about the company. The internal setting of the research will enable you to conduct a qualitative survey cost effectively and swiftly. You may use a set of open-ended interview questions. Allow all the respondents a chance to answer the same questions. You will then be able to compare the responses. Get the employees to talk about their reflections on the characteristics of a favorable workplace. You will have to set aside time to interview each respondent individually, but the intervals should not be too long. Recording and transcribing the interviews can help you use them later for reference and allows the interview to be conducted faster, as writing is not involved.
Ensure you set up a dashboard for the quantitative data to enable you to see visual representation of the data that drive the indicator ranges. Setting up a dashboard for the quantitative data involves using a custom software approach. You will also need to graph and chart the key metrics of employee engagement. You can also use any available software to create spreadsheets, funnels and leader boards. You can put the numerical and statistical data gathered on an electronic dashboard to view it easily. Software such as Live Google sheets even lets you share the data and collaborate with your team in real time.
The data you gather need not be static. Analyzing the information will be more interesting since you can collate the data, generate visuals and model visualizations to improve the business culture and boost employee motivation.
Final Words
Having these techniques within easy reach can help you act promptly whenever a problem arises. Many companies have encountered problems such as high employee turnover, industrial strikes and poor performance. You should acquire and implement the techniques immediately because they are easy, inexpensive and potential business savers. The important thing is to know how to utilize each technique to maximize its benefits.
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