Businesses understandably put considerable effort into motivating their workforces – but are their efforts in the right place?
According to numerous studies it is not induction programmes, on site gyms and company away days that keep your best people happy – it’s the job itself. An individual’s satisfaction in performing a role is the single most significant factor in their level of engagement and, as a result, productivity.
The Narrowing Pool of Candidates
As we increasingly recruit for highly specialised roles and focus more on skills, the ability to select individuals based on the motivating appeal of the various tasks becomes more limited. The General Manager of a warehouse is a highly specialised role demanding specific experience and selection from a narrow field. But whilst specialised, there is great breadth in a role that requires leadership, analysis, planning, budget control and customer management. It would be a rare individual who was equally interested in this range of activities; varying levels of intellectual challenge, ability to exert control, pressure, repetition and interaction with colleagues and customers.
The breadth of intellectual challenge in many roles also makes it difficult to avoid the trap of recruiting someone who is bored with some tasks and out of their depth with others.
With differing personality types suited to particular tasks, and most roles having evolved in organisational structures that contain a breadth of responsibilities, it’s not easy to recruit someone committed to all aspects of the role, and so to the job itself.
Identifying Suitable Candidates
There aren’t easy fixes, and it’s harder the smaller the business - we can’t employ people for the exact number of hours required for a task. But some extreme examples, where overall commercial success depends on real commitment to disparate task types, can probably be avoided – a particular example combined operational management, generating marketing material and sophisticated live pricing analysis – it would be a push to devise the psychological profile for this mix!
The paucity of increasingly specialised skills encourages us to jump at the chance to engage people when we find them, without pausing to check their suitability to the actual dynamics of the role.
Finding The Balance
Whilst we’ll never have an organisation chart that perfectly balances the requirement for skills with the right personality types for each task, an awareness of peoples’ motivations and the elements that they enjoy is a good start.
As often as there is a line in a job description that doesn’t quite fit, there is someone else in the business with an underutilised skill who would relish the opportunity to perform a task that someone else is keen to avoid - that’s two highly motivated people!
It’s not just skills and who can do it – It’s what they like doing, and doing it well, that generates real value. Imagine if your workforce was twice as motivated for double the time – now I’m no analyst....!
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