Numerous employers misguidedly believe that throwing money at employee motivation problems will inevitably solve staff challenges and dissatisfaction.
However, despite more money available as possible rewards, employees often fear complicated and unclear goals to achieve the cash in new monetary compensation schemes because, in reality, staff might actually take home less money per month.
Note that different reward schemes must exist for different classes of employees.
Meanwhile, staff involved in repetitive tasks with less higher-order thinking required for task completion often feel more motivated by monetary rewards.
Some executives error in setting the goals for their employees erroneously thinking that they know best while forgetting the five characteristics of effective goal setting.
First, goals need to contain specificity. Goals that lack specific details confuse employees. The targets you set should be exact.
Dr Max H. Bazerman at Harvard University recommends not giving too many goals, but only a moderate number.
Second, managers should incorporate relevant targets for employees.
A corporate-wide sales target applied to the accounting staff’s incentives would not motivate but, instead, likely provoke finance employees.
Third, researchers insist that employee goals should contain challenging targets. An employee who shows up to work and watched TikTok all day must not easily attain the objectives you set.
Further, you, as the manager, must place goals as moderately difficult without getting too impossible to accomplish.
If the goals you set appear impossible to attain, then your unmotivated employees would look for work elsewhere and lower their performance in your firm.
Fourth, goals must foster commitment by employees in order to successfully achieve results. Commitment entails consistency throughout the year rather than a rush during the last month of the calendar.
Fifth and final, goals should incorporate the participation of the entire departmental team as well as individual goals.
Failure to adhere to the above five goal characteristics may disrupt your employees’ feelings of organisational equity. Humans from very early ages contain an innate ability to judge the fairness of conditions around them.
Parents who raise two or more children know clearly that feelings of fairness come at an early age.
If one child believes that he or she received a smaller sweet than the other child, then crying and complaining quickly follow.
Human beings’ heightened ability to judge fairness as compared to other primates does not end when one reaches secondary school.
It continues throughout one’s life, except that we learn from societal pressure to keep our tantrums over inequality to ourselves.
Inasmuch, an employee must feel that they receive equal pay commensurate with the tasks they perform.
An overworked employee contributing greatly to bottom-line performance should receive corresponding compensation.
Employees around the world and right here in Kenya remain keenly aware of the inequity in office settings. Consequences of inequitable goal distribution include employees changing their performance outputs.
Additionally, efficient firms carefully construct goal systems that equitably distribute objectives and rewards among staff and departments to banish internal inequity perceptions from the company.
Employee emotions must not centre around a colleague who they perceive as receiving proportionally higher rewards than they do.
The employee internalises a tantrum and acts out, not like a child, but instead resulting in lower performance. An example includes if an organisation insists on performance reviews, those reviews must come out equitably.
A checks and balances approach whereby human resources reviews manager input and then provides employees with the opportunity to respond in writing.
After understanding the five goal characteristics, then executives must also incorporate goals at different levels within their organisation.
The most common method of performance-based rewards includes personal rewards. However, the goal characteristics also apply to team rewards and organisation-wide rewards.
Individual rewards encapsulate commissions, royalties, skill-based pay, and merit salary incremental raises (often given as percentages of salary).
However, skill and merit salary pay often empowers employees with more flexibility, better quality results, and consistency.
However, disadvantages entail subjective appraisals leading to demoralisation and higher training costs.
Team rewards involve bonuses on top-line growth and team-based gainsharing whereby employees get rewards for lowering costs and increasing efficiency.
Organisational rewards incorporate profit sharing when employees receive a share of profits, stock options, and company ownership often referred to as “ESOPs” employee stock option plans.
