Motivational Issues and Reward
Introduction
Motivation in the work environment is a vital factor contributing to the firm’s success. Motivation is established from the conscious and insensible principles such as rewards and strength of desire. The human resource managers have a role in ensuring that the employees are motivated as a lack of it may lead to problems in the company. Motivation is one of the main reasons why employees work. There exists a gap between an individual’s desired and actual state. Thus, motivation can be termed as the reduction and manipulation of the gap between the desired and actual state where the manager influences his employees in a special way to work towards achieving the identified goals and objectives. The human resource manager motivates employees by paying them well, having definite goals, listening to their grievances, and recognizing good performance. Based on Lee (2019), employees are productive and innovative if they are satisfied with the motivation given by the organization. Additionally, its moral value to treat people with dignity in all circumstances. Lack of satisfying motivation within a workplace leads to absenteeism, poor services, resentment, and low-quality products.
Based on the humanistic theory of motivation, it’s evident that continuous supervision of employees can lead to motivation problems as workers may lose motivation due to continuous supervision. When an employee must submit endless reports to various managers for performance reporting, one may feel demotivated, thus delivering low-quality work (Curcuruto, Parker and Griffin, 2019, p.228). This issue is associated with micromanagement as employees focus on minor particulars while the vital elements can be overlooked; for example, an employee may be questioned title page of the report being formatted wrongly, an element that the manager will not focus on. Additionally, based on equity theory, all employees should be treated equally and fairly. In instances where employees are treated unequally, they may feel inadequate and underappreciated. The workers may complain that there is favoritism and unfair treatment, thus feeling demotivated, which results in poor performance (Mira, Choong and Thim, 2019, p.781). The employees have a psychological degree that the work is rewarding and paybacks are great; thus, they may complain of discrimination against the employees with the psychological degree of favoritism for social employees. Therefore, this lowers employees’ morale, and they turn to be less motivated, thus leading to negative interactions among the employees.
Effect of motivation issues on employees’ relations
A healthy worker relationship leads to fruitful and good employee satisfaction, thus increasing productivity. Hence leads to a conducive working environment, thus encouraging the employees to focus on the productive things. However, having motivation problems within the organization affects employee relationships by reducing competition between the workers. Just like a person has to charge his phone after some use, it’s the same way the workers need motivation from time to time for them to remain loyal to the firm (Rohmatunnisa, 2021, p.1408). Failure to motivate the employee’s leads them working just for the sake of working and having no desire to compete among themselves, thus delivering poor results. Failure to have good motivation schemes discourages teamwork as employees fail to understand why they should work as a team. Failure to work as a team leads to employees not exchanging ideas and thoughts, which would help them develop unique and innovative ideas that would help the firm’s goals be achieved (De Clercq and Pereira, 2019, p.335). Moreover, motivation hinders employees from positively complementing each other, thus resulting in conflicts among the employees, which hinders the organization’s smooth operations.
The effect of motivational issues affects management, employees, and internal policies and procedures
Motivation is a vital element of organizational success, and failure to have a good motivation scheme may negatively affect the management, employees, and internal policies. Motivational issues affect the performance of the employees; employees who feel that they are under-motivated tend not to take care of the work they perform for the organization, which results in poor performance. As a result of poor performance, the qualitative effects of the motivation problems led to low productivity, among other quantitative consequences. For instance, low motivation contributes to employees’ absenteeism and lateness. Furthermore, motivation issues encourage employees to mainly focus on their issues during the working hours rather than the roles assigned, thus resulting in low and poor productivity. Consequently, the employees tend to be disengaged, thus developing “a don’t care” attitude about the organization, leading to poor performance and productivity (Bryson and White, 2019. p 764).
The firm management works best to ensure that all production sources are utilized in the best manner, which is achieved when there is good cooperation between employees and the management. If the management needs the employees to deliver, they must encourage and motivate them. The effort of managers may not bear fruits if the employees are not motivated, as they will turn out to be a liability to the firm when the employees tend to seek green pastures and increase the rate of absenteeism, thus giving the firm management a hard time recruiting more employees. The recruitment of new employees may be expensive as they will require to train the new employees. Additionally, employee absenteeism leads to poor performance and productivity, thus resulting in customer complaints. When the customers get goods of low quality, they tend to shift to other firms that can offer high-quality goods and services, thus making it hard for the managers to maintain the firms’ competitive advantage. Additionally, absenteeism may lead to conflicts between managers and employees, thus hindering smooth operation within the firm.
Motivation is an internal procedure that helps an employee achieve an objective and goal. Motivation is not directly observed, but rather, it is inferred by noting the worker’s behaviors. The motivation of employees cannot be established without having a definite internal policy and procedure for the firm. The internal policies help to determine the motivation and rewards of the employees. If a firm is experiencing motivation issues, it is hard to develop internal policies as employees may fail to hind to them, thus leading to conflict between them and the managers. Additionally, in situations where the firm may not have a clear understanding of what makes its employees feel motivated, it may be hard to develop rewards and motivation for its employees (Jensen, Kjeldsen and Vestergaard, 2020, p.473). Delayed development of internal policies and procedures on motivation matters may lead to employees feeling unmotivated and unappreciated, thus looking for green pastures.
Effects of Human resource management and legal consideration on employee motivation issues
Human resource management has a primary role in managing human labor. They ensure that employees have enough incentives, rewards, and motivation that ensure that the employees are at content with the firm’s working environment for them to perform better and the firm reputation. A good and conducive working environment leads to improved productivity and reduces absenteeism. The human resource manager has to clearly understand how his employees get motivated to make strategic plans on how to leverage employees’ results that the firm requires. The human resource manager’s schemes should be legal and favorable to the firm. Human resources may help have both negative and positive effects on employee motivation schemes. However, the human resources manager mainly considers having positive effects on employees to ensure that they are creative and have autonomy and initiative characteristics that help in ensuring that there is a production flow for task performance.
A firm HR manager sets goals and objectives for the organization and employees focus on achieving. The set goals must be legal to avoid conflicts with the firm owners. When the HR manager sets performances that are not legal, it may be demotivating for employees to work towards achieving them (Bryson and White, 2019. p 758). Setting performance goals is one of the vital elements that encourage the employees and motivate them to stay engaged with their goals. The rewards and motivation for the employees may be prizes, vacations, career progressions, and bonuses. To achieve good results, the firm must have ambitious targets that would help stimulate high productivity. Setting unrealistic objectives and goals may lead to reverse consequences and generate dismay and issues among the employees.
Additionally, it’s legal for the human resource managers to consider recognizing positive attitudes for the employees as they have the proactive and successful attitudes that should be valued. Autonomy within the organization enhances diversity, elasticity, and dynamism the organization. Moreover, recognition is vital as salary payment; thus, recognizing and complimenting employees signify that their good work does not go unrecognized and unnoticed. The HR manager may develop career plans for their employees to promote their career progression. Employee recognition is as important as wage payment; consequently, acknowledging and appreciating them shows that their hard work is appreciated. The main aim is to determine the rules to be followed, for instance, define the time one should work in a certain department before promotion, thus motivating them to have the right attitude that can help them reach there.
Employee motivation script dialogue
Every employee needs motivation from time to time to keep him or they encouraged to work. In every firm, the HR manager or the project manager has to deal with the different personalities of his employees and determine various techniques that help in motivating the employees for them to keep working. The employees have different things that motivate them, and what motivates one employee may be a demotivating factor for another employee. Thus, the burden falls on the human resource managers, such as evaluating and determining ways to motivate their employees. The managers must have enough knowledge and skills on establish motivating schemes that would favor every employee and give them a sense of belonging. The employees may be motivated in various ways, such as feedback and recognition. The workers are always happy when they are recognized and treated fairly in their workplace, thus achieving the firm’s goals. Their efforts are based on how hard human resources practices are being undertaken in the organization. Based on Lee (2019), employee recognition helps the employees get their Supervisor’s feedback, thus learning their strengths and weaknesses. Involving employees in the decision-making process makes employees feel like part of the organization, thus having a sense of belonging, motivating them to work hard to achieve the organizational goals. Therefore, this section entails a scripted dialogue between employees and managers to establish ways to solve motivational issues in the firm. A dialogue between a successful law firm being represented by Susan, the managing director and an uprising law firm represented by Paul, the Supervisor, on the employees’ issues. These issues are motivational and how to develop a reward strategy for the employee.
Susan: Good morning. It is a pleasure seeing you again, and I am happy today we get to spend some time together and speak on the issues affecting the employees.
Paul: It was a pleasure too last time we saw each other in the courtroom, it wasn’t much over a good talk. We are here to get my company on the radar, but first, we have to deal with our employees.
Susan: Yeah, I saw the email you sent me. You have a little issue in motivating your employees, and you want to come up with new reward strategies or even improve on those you have.
Paul: Yes, the employees are our face in the judicial system. You can expect to see the managing director and the Supervisor on the field, but sometimes, the employees represent us. The employees might contact our big clients before we get to them or even go to court with a case or just offer advice to clients; this is what the public sees.
Susan: I got what you are saying, and that is exactly why we are here to help each other get to the top. The motivational issues are just there to help the employees get the reason, strength, and goal. The law firm on its own should be a conducive environment with cubicles for the lawyer. For departmental, the heads of them should have their own offices and get involved in the firm’s growth. This will make work easier for employees under them. This is the first step to bringing the firm together so that any discomfort to the employees is noted and gets to you as the Supervisor.
Paul: What are the other ways to motivate them without going through the departmental heads? The settings of the firm are well taken care of.
Susan: Some employees have low confidence in themselves. You who have been in the judicial system know how this can affect you. Without confidence, the employee cannot make himself an asset to the firm. As a supervisor, you should move from one cubicle to another, correct them with love and respect, and appreciate their work. Low expectations also lead to a lack of seriousness. If you set goals for them and give rewards for work well done, it is the motivation to work. Lack of interest in the law system is also a problem. Some people get into the system without interest; they just want to get paid. You should offer more engaging tasks that help them see the fun in the job.
Paul: Okay. What you are saying is sometimes the issue is with the employee? We just need to notice them and see how to handle them.
Susan: Yes, not all the time; the management problem. The management only comes in when the employee is punished or criticized because most employees are sensitive to them. Lastly, we should just employ a good reward strategy.
Paul: Apart from motivational issues, we also have a problem. What should we do when it comes to that? (Sips his coffee)
Susan: First, you should use appreciative measures like celebrations for a case wined, offering a reward for efforts of the inferior employees, offering vacations and time off for the employees every year and sometimes adding payment in the salary for employees who have proven to do well in their work. They should also be allowed to apply their skills in the field. The Supervisor should see what they are good at and use those skills to the maximum.
Paul: Thank you so much for your time. You’ve given me a better understanding of the employees and how to get good results. Now I see why you’ve made it. It was nice talking to you. (Rises to leave)
Susan: You are welcome any other time. (Shakes his hands)
Reference List
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