Page 39 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

10 Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

professionals must be willing to give up traditional beliefs about
the role of motivation and factors that affect employee motiva-
tion if they are to deal effectively with today’s workforce.

Do Your Employees Enjoy Their Jobs?
The question of whether a person enjoyed his or her work is a
recent and primarily Western phenomenon. Certainly through
the 1950s, work served the primary purpose of putting food on
the table and a roof over one’s head. While people undoubtedly
developed friendships at work and may even have enjoyed their
work depending on their profession and position, such issues
were not viewed as particularly relevant to making a living. Over
the past few decades, employees have placed more and more
importance on deriving a certain level of satisfaction and mean-
ing from their work. This is particularly true once employees
reach a certain monetary threshold that comfortably provides
for their quality of life. Today’s leaders who wish to maximize
the productivity of their employees must fully understand and
embrace the notion that employees work for more than just
money; they work to feel good about themselves.

Show Me the Money!
Money can motivate individual performance; however, the
impact on performance is typically short-lived. Money falls
under what Frederick Herzberg called a Hygiene factor, in other
words, a factor that has more to do with decreasing motivation
than increasing it. Money matters a lot under two conditions.
First, it matters at the very low end of the pay scale where an
additional dollar an hour can make a significant difference to an
individual. Second, it matters when people find out that they are
being undercompensated relative to a colleague or market value;