Motivation in the Business World

Motivation is the driving force behind a person’s action. If you have a low motivation towards work, you will take longer time to complete it and the quality of the output may not be very good, either. On the other hand, if you have high motivation towards a job, you will not only enjoy the work but also get satisfaction out of the outcome. It has been observed that people who enjoy their work also feel the most fulfilled in their lives.

People often try to find what the factors to motivate others are. If an employee can be motivated to do his work, then not only will he get a sense of satisfaction and triumph from his efforts, but the company will also get high productivity, good outcome and all this will result in the employee getting rewards for his hard work. When people are motivated at work, there are many positive forces that play in the working environment. Self-motivated people motivate others and persuade them to work better. This improves the efforts put inside the job and the results improve.

Successful managers always make a clear point to explain their team what is needed of them and also delegate work as per a person’s talent. This makes the entire workforce feel like a cohesive unit, where everyone is functioning like a part of the machinery.

Case Study                                                                                

Case Study Procter & Gamble (better known as P&G) has mastered the skills of motivating its employees. That’s the reason they have been operating successfully for many years in more than 80 countries. They have understood that different cultures get motivated with different rewards.

For example, Swedish might not appreciate the remuneration-based reward system of the Americans, because they appreciate being rewarded with time-offs more. Similarly, Japanese hold group-based incentives and equality at workplace as rewards for their hard-work. For them, that could be the incentive to get them motivated.

P&G has tailored its reward and incentive program as per the culture of the place it operates in and this has resulted in the company featuring in Fortune’s “World’s Most Admired Companies”.

What is Personal Motivation?

All humans are born with the innate desire to dream of a better future. This dream creates the desire to achieve our goals in life. We feel the need to know that we have achieved something important in our lives. It is one of the most important motivations behind our actions in life.

This motivation improves our confidence and makes us more focused on our work. It makes us disciplined and makes us set realistic targets that we can achieve. Once we reach our self-set targets, it is this motivation that makes us work harder to challenge ourselves and climb greater heights.

This is the reason people say that “the success of hard work is sweet”. It’s due to the efforts that go into getting the achievements, it feels great when the rewards start coming and it also feels good to enjoy them. The more we achieve, the more self-confident we become. In turn, the more self-confident we become, the more we achieve.

The complete opposite happens when we don’t manage to achieve our goals. There is a dip in confidence, and people start questioning their own abilities. Many opt out of their careers they are in and feel happy to settle down for something way less below their potentials.

There is a very interesting co-relation between motivation, confidence, and achievements. Higher motivation leads to higher confidence, and higher confidence results in higher achievements. However, if the targets are too steep, then it will be very tough to achieve the targets, and then low confidence sets in. That’s why it’s common practice in any training program to start the trainees with easy, achievable targets.

When a supervisor motivates his team-mates, he is supposed to know that there are two types of motivation that the team-mates will look for. One, where they will see whether the supervisor is motivating them to partake in wrong actions, or if he is motivating them to achieve an unachievable target.

But the second observation they will make is if the supervisor himself is motivated enough for the targets. If the supervisor appears to not be convinced that these targets can be achieved, then no matter how hard he tries, his words will sound hollow.

That’s why it’s important to give self-motivation as much importance as motivating others. A person who tries to motivate people without thinking about their benefits and returns from the efforts, is only going to get short-lived motivation.