IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY HONEY…

Taking  a cue from the paradigm shift in the way individuals in various walks of life are moving from lifelong marriage with their current jobs to a give some & take some approach towards their employers, I am making an attempt to try & relate it to the first ever theory they touch upon in Human resources & Marketing training alike.

An employee today typically works to put “food on the table” (as one of my colleagues chose to put it) However, different individuals have different motivations to don the paint & to go to work every day. Some people work for work for personal fulfillment. Others like to accomplish goals and feel as if they are contributing to a larger goal, something extend their personal selves at work and create an outlet for their creativity through meaningful work. Some of us love we do. Some like to interact with customers and coworkers, thus extending their socialization need to an arena where it does not count as ‘meaningless’. Some like change from the mundane routine of life, challenges everyday decisions throw at them, and diverse problems they get to solve. The expectations from work are diverse. One thing in the melee remains default-Money!

A typical employee today has expectations from his employer commensurate with the expectations the employer has with the employee. From the work & effort that goes into meeting his KRAs he seeks personal development, career inputs, and professional expertise along with the customary paycheck.

In his ‘Learned needs theory’ (also called acquired needs theory), David McClelland classifies an individual’s needs in job functions into 3 sets, namely, Achievement, Affiliation & Power. Other dimensions to these needs would encompass a desire for activity desire for ownership, desire for competence, desire for recognition and a desire for meaning from the 8 hours (or more) spent at work. This would fall in line with Maslow’s triangle in roughly this way (diagram). Certain desires overlap needs classifications & all of them need the lowest (orange) Physiological need (read Money) to be fulfilled.

 

So if it not about money, why do employees jump jobs at times even ready to pay out huge amounts of severance penalties? The ills that mar work culture in most organizations today are as under:

(Source: personal question answer session of around 500 colleagues, ex-colleagues, friends & families)

• Company politics
• Unclear expectations & undefined KRAs
• Internal competition & zero knowledge transfer between employees
• Withholding information critical for employees to perform their work
• Lack of constructive feedback
• Unnecessary rules & processes to abide by
• Unproductive, never-ending meetings for employees to attend
• Like treatment for poor & high performing employees
• Underutilized capability of employees

These basic needs if taken care of, given equal pay scales in a before/after scenario, chances are bright that the employee performance & motivation to work will soar. Slowly, a few organizations are turning towards non-monetary motivators to ensure high performance. Such organizations do not struggle to capture employee engagement in power points…

They make the effort! Cheers!

Separated, by a mouse click

There is a marked increase in the number of people online in post work hours & work hours. Over the past years, employers moved from blocking social networking sites on the LAN to now allowing GTalk & Skype to facilitate voice calls over high speed internet thanks to cost cutting initiatives. Even otherwise, sites like meebo.com & the likes were doing the rounds in corporate circles.

A colleague at work mentioned the other day, “One works to put food on the table”; Earn, Learn & make friends seems to be the new mantra for the new age employee who is slowly moving from lifetime employment to lifetime employability. The office-goers who spend the better part of the day in front of their machines re-login from the comforts of their homes to connect reconnect. Sometimes I wonder, where the childhood time we spent playing in the park go. Employee engagement practitioners can sure learn their bit from these social networking giants. After all, they do manage to make us part away with a portion of our ‘me-time’ to indulge in status updates to tell the world how sad or happy or annoyed we are.

Some interesting statistics to note would be:

1. Number of people online during work
2. Number of people online post work
3. The Rising wave of online applications which suddenly see an upsurge in usage patterns among common friend lists. E.g. Farmville, mafia wars, or even the random quizzes. It begins as a contagious fever & spreads through virtual contacts
4. Swelling number of people on Orkut, fB, twitter (ref: your own friend lists)
5. Shift towards fB & twitter from Orkut triggered by none other than a common community sentiment that collectively shunned one in the favour of the other
6. Always online syndrome- the popularity of smartphones, fring.com, data devices for broadband aka Tata Photon
7. Number of hours spent at work(counting not only the hours of physical presence but also the office thought process that never seems to leave one’s head) & the corresponding need to reach out
8. LinkedIn & its changing face- Most IT departments do not block this professional ‘networking’ website. LinkedIn on its part is becoming more and more personalized nowadays. What with the latest additions on personal details on professional profiles
9. Telecom on the go-death of the landline connections (Ref 6. Above)
10. Home internet connections Homes without internet connections
11. Fitness fetish for mouse potatoes … How many of you have joined the gym?