The 1 Way to NOT Motivate Employees and 5 Ways to Get It Right

If you’ve been in Finance for a long time, you know there are a lot of situations when you can trust your instincts.

Beyond numbers, outlooks and budgets, there’s one area where it’s best to stick to the facts: how you motivate employees.

How You Motivate Employees Can’t Be Left to Chance

Time and again, researchers have found that employee motivation is the key driver of performance. In fact, one study in the Harvard Business Review found that motivating employees can’t be left to chance.

The worst crime when trying to motivate employees is this: trusting your gut. Turns out, our guts aren’t all that in tune with what motivates and engages employees.

Leaders often get it wrong because they think they know employees well enough to decide what motivates them.

This is a dangerous game because several studies have found motivation drops sharply after people have been on the job with their managers for three to six months.

Follow the Scientific Route

Instead, finance leaders want to approach motivation as a science rather than an art.

How? Avoid the common pitfalls of following your instinct when it comes to motivating employees. Those mistakes include:

1. Setting the Wrong Kind of Goals

Setting goals and rewards is a powerful way to drive motivation. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all practice.

Instead, researchers have found there’s a difference in setting goals, depending on the kind of job that needs to be accomplished:

1. Stretch goals with ambitious targets work best when the job and the outcome can be clearly defined and assigned.
2. When you want to motivate people to do complex or creative tasks, asking them to “do their best” works better.

2. Unintentionally Skewing Performance Evaluations

Many leaders reward employees who are like them – mostly on a subconscious level, researchers found. So performance evaluations get distorted, and employees who aren’t favored get discouraged and eventually underperform.

You want to use more objective data to evaluate employees’ performance, level of motivation and the kinds of rewards that can take them to the next level.

3. Assigning Boring Work

Work that is goal-oriented is often regimented into specific, measurable and predictable components – which is a recipe for repetitive, boring work.

Most motivation is fueled by an internal interest and drive – and boring work doesn’t light that fire.

Researchers also found that extrinsic rewards, such as cash, do little to make boring work any more exciting and motivating.

You will always have mundane tasks and projects to dole out. But try to design jobs with some exciting elements. The key is to put people in the right roles to motivate them better. Make sure everyone finds challenge and meaning in their jobs.

The best way to do that is to find out what they find challenging and meaningful. Then work with them to add those elements to their roles and regularly review their job realities to be certain they’re getting mostly what they want.

4. Giving Useless Feedback

Many leaders give generic, scripted feedback. Yet, researchers find that managers who give accurate, constructive feedback are best at driving employee motivation and performance.

You want to focus on strengths and the benefits of addressing a flaw. Then you can work with them to improve in that area.

5. Focusing Solely on Rewards

Rewards are a helpful way to motivate employees. They do want money and perks. But only dangling the carrot won’t get results.

Instead, MIT researchers found leaders want to help employees develop their skills, talents and careers to make an impact on their motivation.

This is best accomplished through ongoing informal feedback and a forward-thinking mindset. Remember, upward mobility isn’t necessarily the only way to motivate employees to perform. Many employees will be motivated by learning new skills or expanding their reach within the organization.