This article is the third in a three-part series on employee motivation. In case you missed them, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2.

Photo by lumaxart

In Part 2, I discussed the five sources that influence and motivate people. In this article, I’ll share some strategies to help you maximize the effectiveness of your human resources programs. I’ll also be exploring some of the common mistakes organizations make and how you can avoid them. Let’s start by looking at one of the most challenging motivational drivers to influence.

Intrinsic Motivation

When you’re considering job structures, deciding on promotions and making hiring decisions, it’s important to consider the role of intrinsic motivation. I’m sure you’ve seen instances where someone didn’t like a task or project but did a great job anyways – they’re often motivated by one of the other four sources we discussed. If you hire or promote someone who’s primarily intrinsically motivated into a position that they don’t enjoy, their performance is going to be very poor.

Since it’s almost impossible to tell if someone’s very intrinsically motivated prior to letting them actually try a job out, this can be a difficult pitfall to avoid. One strategy to avoid a bad fit: Be very clear and honest when describing a new job or role. This is especially important for recruiters, who often have a tendency to avoid describing any of the negative aspects of a job. If you present a complete picture, you allow intrinsically motivated individuals to screen themselves out of roles that they wouldn’t be successful in.

Instrumental Motivation

This is the area that most companies do a pretty good job at. In fact, most companies put too much emphasis on instrumental motivation and not enough on the other sources. If your only way of keeping people in the game is bigger bonuses and new job titles (golden handcuffs, as they’re often called), performance will eventually suffer.

Photo by Tracy O

Very few people are influenced exclusively by instrumental forces, so when a job offer comes along that gives them the same amount of pay but also touches on one of their other motivational drivers, they’ll be gone, and you’ll have another position to fill. There’s also only so long a person can work just for the money before they get bored and stop trying as hard.

Another common pitfall companies make is not taking into account the Expectancy Theory, particularly whether or not a person values the reward you’re offering them. We’ve been discussing this concept in terms of using multiple motivational sources. Specific to instrumental motivation, though, it also means whether or not they value the dollar amount you’re offering. A $500 bonus may be very influential to an hourly manufacturing employee, but I bet a top executive wouldn’t blink if you dangled that carrot in front of him or her.

Instrumental motivational tools work great – studies and casual observation both confirm that. Just make sure that it’s not your only way to motivate people, and that what you’re offering is actually valuable to your audience.

Goal Internalization

As I mentioned in Part 2, Goal Internalization could be described as “taking one for the team.” It occurs when a person so strongly identifies with the goal or mission of an organization that they’ll do things just to see that goal realized. Let’s be honest – you may love your job, but almost everyone still has aspects of their job that they’d rather not do. For most people, the instrumental rewards are what helps them push through it. But goal internalization can be a powerful tool.

You’re not going to see much of this at, say, a firm that sells non-FDA approved health supplements. But for many companies, particularly those in the non-profit sector or those involved in humanitarian or environmental efforts, this can be a very powerful lever. It can also be a particularly important driver of behavior at non-profits, where other motivational forces are often low or non-existent.

A company with a great goal or mission doesn’t inherently reap the benefits of this form of motivation. If your employees don’t identify with the mission, this type of motivation won’t influence them (expectancy theory again). But even if they support what you do, you might not be positioning it correctly. A very important function of human resources is corporate cheerleader. We play an important role in getting people excited about an organization’s goals, mission and objectives. Deliver a strong message, deliver it often, and if you can, get the CEO/President and VPs involved, too (shouldn’t be hard – just figure out what their motivational drivers are).

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the Motivation Series. But let’s not stop the discussion here. How do you motivate your employees? Do you have any programs or practices that you can share with the Sandbox? Comment below.