Startup Advice

There are several workable scientific theories about how employee satisfaction can and does affect productivity. Understanding what motivates your employees is critical to understanding how to leverage that motivation into productivity by providing an incentive that outweighs the actions required to successfully achieve those tasks.

• Motivation can be extrinsic – Consisting of external factors such as a commonly used monetary incentive.

• Motivation can be intrinsic – Consisting of internal factors such as an individual’s own desire to be successful.

Increasing motivation among your employees, on-site or remote, requires more than just bonus-based employee incentive programs. Having an organized company is also key in keeping employee productivity on an even keel.

3 Key Elements of a Business that Inspire Employees to Achieve

These three tips will not only help your business maintain a healthy working atmosphere, but will also create a smooth business model that is lauded in an age of increased social awareness and transparency.

Trustworthy Leadership

All of the leaders in your business, from your shift managers up to your C list employees, should be looking out for the best interests of the employees they have working beneath them on the organization chart. Having strong role models in those positions who do not treat their workforce as subordinates is critical to creating a desire to do more, to be more, with your company.

This type of productivity theory is called the Psychological Empowerment Theory. The empowering process is often carried out through a competent leader or manager who often created self-managed teams, provides business transparency, and creates autonomy.

Career Advancement and Business “Hygiene”

One element that can’t be replaced with a few well-placed days off or a productivity bonus is the area of career advancement. If your company makes a habit of looking within for leadership before going public with job openings, your productivity will increase as a good bit of healthy competition to be noticed arises.

Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory would be successful using this model. The Herzberg requires two factors, those being hygiene and motivation. Motivation includes, advancement and growth. Hygiene includes policy, administration, and working conditions.

Social Impact

More often these days we are seeing huge movements that are demanding social responsibility from traditional workplaces. Whether that responsibility being exercised comes from a business’s product or from the way they create it, be sure to share what your company is doing to uphold their civil and social responsibilities within the community and at large.

This falls nicely under the Job Characteristics Model theory. Providing employees with this type of motivation enables the required experience responsibility, experience meaningfulness, and knowledge of results, that can motivate employees in the long-term.

Keep in mind that your employees’ satisfaction with their company has a direct, practical utility that is linked to very important outcomes. They include everything from employee turnover, productivity rates, absenteeism, and attitudinal variables that affect the employees day-to-day work grind, either positively or negatively.