Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 1

1. The Next Generation of Employee Motivation

Employee motivation has always been on the mind of business leaders. Corporations and universities have continued to teach leaders the theories of motivational experts like BF Skinner, Herzberg, Maslow and Bandura, who all sought to answer the question, “What motivates people to take certain actions?” Ever since the inception of the industrial age, managers have been asking the same question, “What can I do to motivate my employees?”

Managers have been taught conventional wisdom about motivation as part of almost every management training program since the 1970’s. But today’s world is very different because of:

• Globalization and diversity
  
• Increasing number of Gen Y employees
  
• Continued outsourcing to former third world countries
  
• Unrelenting investor pressure for continuous revenue and profit performance and growth
  
• No let-up on mergers and acquisitions
  

The consequences on the workforce of these large scale issues are:

• Increased pressure and stress
  
• Less friendly work environments
  
• Greater demand for increased productivity and longer work hours
  
• Skepticism about repeated strategy shifts intended to meet financial and growth expectations
  

Repeated studies have validated that a significant number of employees world-wide are less than fully engaged in their work and that it has a deleterious impact on company performance.

The Corporate Leadership Council calculates that only 11% of the world’s professional workforce is fully engaged, leaving 89% up for grabs or fully disengaged. 

Gallup’s research indicates that 60% of employees are unengaged and a full 17% of US workers are “actively disengaged,” which leads to lower productivity that costs the US $300 billion a year. Furthermore, actively disengaged workers are 10 times more likely to say they will leave their organizations within a year (48%) than engaged staff (4%). 

ISR, an international employee research company, has conducted research that shows that 54% of the workforce is complacent, less committed, or fully disengaged. 

Accenture conducted a global study of the priorities of C-Suite executives, and engagement ranks third among the factors executives considered critical to performance. The top three organizational capabilities executives view as most important to competing in the marketplace are:

1.  Developing effective leadership capabilities (65%)

2. Creating an organization that adapts to change (49%)

3. Engaging and aligning multiple stakeholders (43%)