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Motivating and Retaining People "Successful companies create a culture that recognizes, respects and empowers people in order to motivate and retain them." Five Crucial Strategies Five powerful strategies must become an integral part of your corporate culture if you believe that taking care of the needs of employees, who take care of customers, is the way to grow your business. These strategies motivate, reward and retain valuable employees. They focus on intrinsic rewards -- those behaviors that arise from within because they are basic human needs; they come from doing the work and seeing the accomplishment, and are not tied directly to compensation. Intrinsic rewards make us come to work, do our job and leave feeling good, only to look forward to doing it again the next day. These strategies may be supported by extrinsic rewards; compensation, benefits, bonuses and perks, but such rewards are secondary. Focusing on these five crucial motivation and retention strategies may well prove to be the answer to the predicament of escalating compensation. 1. Commitment. Mutual commitment, between owners and managers; managers and employees, is communicated to the customer through excellent service and product, thereby creating durability, which can carry a company competitively into the quickly changing market place. This mutual commitment is woven into the vision, mission and philosophy of the corporate culture and is communicated from the top down through the implementation and practice of the other four strategic points. 2. Recognition and respect. Ways of recognizing employees are boundless. Recognition includes, but is not limited to: a simple compliment of a job well done; the use and publicity of a small idea that makes a product better; the feeling and belief that the day's work was a valuable contribution to the total job; and the pride one takes in working for a company that values and respects its employees as individuals with differences and differing needs. 3. Growth. Employees, like the executives who run the company, want to grow professionally and personally in their work. This strategy requires a financial investment in the individual employee and in the future of the company. 4. Participation and decision making. Employees who feel they are involved, autonomous and responsible contributors to company policy, decisions, products and customer service, are the company. 5. Teamwork. Working together to plan for the growth and maintenance of something is part of basic human needs. Motivated employees, like motivated customers, are an investment for any company. In the final analysis, all businesses are customer service businesses, and all employees are emissaries. Back to top | ||
