Motivation in the workplace is one of the most difficult topics for leaders to understand and successfully communicate to their workers. Work motivation is a complex set of dynamic forces that originates within and beyond a person’s personal being, to motivate work-related behaviour, and therefore to determine the overall shape, intensity, and length of that behaviour.
One way of thinking about motivation in the workplace is to split employees into groups, and reward those employees who are meeting high performance standards or are performing above average. In this way, we could say that high performance employees have high self-esteem, whereas low performers have low self-esteem. Motivation at work is therefore really the outcome of high self-esteem and low self-motivation; it is not just the result of low performance on specific tasks. This type of analysis seems to suggest that there are two primary motivational drivers at work: high self-esteem and low motivation.
Another approach to studying motivation at work is to imagine a funnel. At each stage of the funnel, there are different rewards (either cash or tokens) that you can give your employees to help them progress through the funnel. For example, you might start by giving your employees cash rewards for each task that they complete, progressing up to more expensive tokens when they hit the final stage. Another approach that some companies use is to imagine that there are two buckets in the workplace – one for high performance workers and another for lower-performing workers. By giving your employees cash rewards for hitting a certain level in either bucket, they will be motivated to increase their own level. In order to be able to put these funnels in place you need to get some of the basics right first such as providing your staff with the appropriate Next Day delivery desks from companies like Best Buy Office Chairs so they can work effectively and comfortably.