You may work in a pleasant environment, but if you see no purpose in your job, you are unlikely to be motivated. This is why it is so important to design a job role that is suitable for each employee. In a well-designed job, the job-holder should be able to use a variety of skills in their job, be involved in the whole activity, and have a meaningful role in which they understand the impact of the work they do. You should give your staff freedom to carry out tasks and provide them with regular feedback on what they are doing well as well as where they need to improve.

Few managers have the opportunity to design a job role from scratch. Unless you are embarking on a major change program, any new job will almost certainly have to fit in with the current structure. However, you can make changes that will have a significant effect on motivation in your team. Every individual has different strengths and skills. If you understand what these are, you may be able to allocate the work in your team to play to someone’s strengths. Bring your team together and ask them to think about their jobs and how they could be better designed. Be careful, though, because any changes have to be made in the light of the overall effectiveness of the organization. For example, deciding that you will unilaterally agree a policy of flexible working for your team is probably not a good idea for the organization as a whole. An effective way of improving existing jobs is job rotation—moving people around so that they develop a broader range of skills and gain experience of doing other jobs. Job enrichment is a means of giving people greater depth rather than breadth in their roles. It is about giving them more responsibility, autonomy, and discretion. This is often done to add interest where people are in very straightforward jobs.

Most measurements of performance don’t give a view of the future. Take the sales target as an example. Close to the month end, a salesman may make unrealistic promises to his customers and take orders that will allow him to reach his bonus. This will ensure achievement of the performance target, but his behavior may upset the customer in the longer term, causing his customer to place their business elsewhere. This behavior is gaming^* the system and as a manager you need to take steps to avoid this.

Motivation has short- and long-term elements. In the short term, commitment, direction, and enthusiasm will motivate people. But in the longer term, people need to see that they are being led and that changes are being made to help them do their work. In the longer term, giving people the right tools, creating the right working environment, and giving them the training they need is much more motivational. Short-term success has to be translated into long-term success by changing the way the work is done.

Ask yourself whether you are people-focused or task-focused—do you devote most of your effort to achieving the goals that have been set for the organization, or do you focus on ensuring that people are content in their jobs? In reality, you should do both. The organization needs to achieve its goals and targets, so these are important. However, the people who work for the organization have their own needs and these can’t be ignored. The key to motivational management is to align your employees’ needs closely with those of the organization. Management theorists Robert Blake and Jane Mouton created a grid that reflects four approaches to management. They suggest that managers should aim to be in the top right hand box, showing high concern for both people and performance.

Blake–Mouton management grid

One of the key benefits of the appraisal process is that it provides a structured approach to managing performance. This is important, as personal objectives are essential to guiding motivation. It also forces managers to sit down and have a frank discussion with each team member. It is important not to rely on the appraisals alone to manage your team; you will need to monitor performance regularly and communicate informally as well. However, having an organization-wide mechanism for managing performance and career aspirations is invaluable.

Appraisals normally consist of formal meetings between the individual and their immediate manager, focusing on objectives and their progress. Discuss how the objective is being achieved as well as what has been achieved. The “how” is essential for long-term success. If an individual has achieved a high level of output but has poached resources from other teams to achieve this, take this into account while assessing performance.

Everybody in your organization is dependent on the efforts of other people, so, in setting objectives, you need to take account of the context. For example, the sales team is often seen as a department where targets are achieved solely through the efforts of the sales people, but this is not the case. The team that processes the orders is also important, as are those who designed and created a good product. Motivating people to exert higher levels of effort will improve performance, but in many administrative, service, and manufacturing jobs the system has a much greater impact on the level of output than the effort of individual employees. As a manager you will need to keep this in mind while setting goals for your employees to avoid unrealistic expectations from your staff.

People are motivated when their objectives are linked to the overall goals of the organization and they can see how they contribute to the organization’s success. Without this line of sight, people can easily lose their sense of purpose at work, which can adversely affect their motivation. Cascade the objectives down through the organization, with each department having a stated aim and a set of goals that must be reached to achieve the overall objective.

Break down objectives into individual targets that can be used as measures of performance. For example, the objective might be to improve the quality of customer service in a restaurant, and the targets following from that might be to have all diners seated within five minutes of their arrival, to have orders transmitted to the kitchen within five minutes of being taken, and to clear tables within five minutes of the diners vacating them.

Stretch goals are goals that are demanding, but not impossible to reach—often described as “high but achievable.” You will need to be careful when you set these goals to make them work. Here are some tips to help you avoid the pitfalls:

Not all the objectives you set should be linked to short-term performance outcomes. There must be a balance between the needs of the organization and those of the individual. Training and development may take your staff away from their day-to-day job and may require the organization to spend money, but setting a personal development goal is motivational as it demonstrates the organization is interested in the individual and their long-term career. As part of the appraisal process, discuss the employees’ skills and longer term development needs and include these in their personal objectives.

How you set objectives is very important. Set targets face to face with your employees. This will allow you to explain what the targets are and discuss their feasibility and implications. To be motivational, objectives need to be owned, so discuss them with your employees to get feedback. This will help you gauge whether they are prepared to accept the objective. Choose a suitable channel to communicate with them. If you distribute the sales targets for the year by e-mail, it will tell everyone what is required, but does little for motivation. If you manage too many people to see them all individually, consider how to reorganize the reporting relationship to ensure each individual is managed properly.

The usual way of measuring progress is to plot a graph of KPIs^*, such as monthly sales figures, against the target. But not all progress can be tracked so simply—some projects require considerable input before change in the output can be measured. To avoid demotivating your staff, you need to measure progress against each of the activities that contributes to achieving the outcome.

Measurement provides feedback and feedback should be acted upon. For the measurement to be motivational, make sure that those being measured see the results and understand how they were calculated. If this doesn’t happen, they will not know how to improve their performance. Ideally, people need to measure their own performance, so that feedback is instantaneous. This way the individual or team can see quickly how they are progressing, allowing them to act even before management is alerted to a problem—for example, keeping a graph of calls handled or components produced provides feedback in real time. But you can’t measure progress on all aspects of your work. Sometimes others have to measure your work for you—many accounting measures fall into this category.

You need to choose the correct indicator to measure your employees’ performance. For instance, how would you assess the performance of a maintenance team? Is it good if they are constantly busy and working long hours? Does this show how motivated they are? If they are all sitting down drinking coffee is it because they are lazy and demotivated? In fact, you want your maintenance team to be idle most of the time, as this means that all the equipment is working and your factory is producing. Be careful to choose the correct measure, and not to confuse high levels of activity with performance.

Training should be encouraged so that it is woven into the culture of the organization. Having a good training plan and being aware of development needs are good ways of attracting the best people to join your organization, of motivating them, and also of retaining them. This can give a business a substantial advantage over its competitors. It is essential that the training itself is of a good standard, otherwise it is a waste of time. Though the appraisal meeting provides a formal opportunity for the individual and manager to discuss training, development needs arise throughout the year and should be addressed from time to time to ensure success. You must also ensure the training meets the employee’s own development needs to keep them motivated.

Any type of training involves spending time or money (and usually both), so it is important to ensure you derive maximum benefit from it. Make sure you seek out underlying needs, suited to the individual’s job role. For example, if they are learning a skill, make sure they will be able to practice it. Having established these, you should brief the individual beforehand on what they can expect from the training. Discuss afterwards what they have learnt and how they should use it.

Rather than sending employees for external training, you can consider other methods of development:

Everyone likes to receive a thank you and to get credit for work well done. Identifying when things have been done well and recognizing this formally is an excellent way of motivating on a day-to-day basis.

  All organizations should ensure that the basics of recognition, such as saying “thank you,” are ingrained in all employees. However, many companies also run formal recognition systems. These tend to reward the teams or individuals with the greatest output, those who have built good relationships with their customers, and those who have supported their colleagues most.

  Recognition, whether formal or informal, is a way of ensuring that people, and managers in particular, are on the lookout for good performance, and promote it around the company. Here are some other ways to recognize the efforts of your employees:

Informal recognition systems may rely on local management initiative, but they are essential. They require managers to know what is going on and to be able to spot good work and high levels of effort. As a manager, you need to be involved in what your employees are doing and saying. This, in itself, is motivating to your staff, who see that you are interested in their work.

  However, be aware that recognition is not as simple as saying “thank you”—people can see when you aren’t being sincere. It is important to react spontaneously when you notice their efforts and mean what you say. Tell your boss about employees who perform well—being perceived positively by the senior management will boost their morale. Your staff will also appreciate it if you make a personal effort to recognize good performance by thanking them face-to-face. If appropriate, consider an inexpensive gift such as flowers or chocolates, although if you start doing this, make it a policy for all high-performing employees, to avoid accusations of favoritism.

The motivational element of pay comes from linking the level of financial return to the performance of an individual or team. The intention is to motivate people to put in more effort because they know they will receive a greater financial reward. Here are some other reasons for linking pay and performance:

To link pay and performance, you must be able to objectively measure the element of performance you wish to reward. You need to select the elements you reward with care—if you reward only one element of performance you will need other management approaches to ensure other aspects are not neglected. Fairness is one of the most important factors in linking performance with reward. When the system is seen to be fair, people will be motivated. If people work independently, then reward the individual for his or her performance. If team effort is required, you must reward the team effort. Target setting is the most difficult aspect of linking pay to performance. You will need to collect enough data to be sure that your target is both stretching and attainable.