Right Goals to Motivate Your Employees

Right Goals to Motivate Your Employees

Right Goals to Motivate Your Employees

How hard do organisations try to motivate their employees?

The answer is – not very hard! Too many organisations veer between two extremes: on the one side we hear again and again the self-righteous assertion “They get paid, so they ought to want to work properly”. Unfortunately, as in most spheres of life, the ‘ought to’ mindset prevents action and alienates those who are not, for whatever reasons, subscribing. ‘Ought to’ should be dumped, unceremoniously, in the ‘opinionated’ basket!

On the other side, companies spend money on convening mass meetings, rather evangelical style, and paying large sums for a ‘motivating speaker’, in the mistaken belief that this has any lasting impact on their organisation. These sessions are very enjoyable, inspiring even. But it is the equivalent to have a binge coffee drinking session as a substitute for steady nutritious diet.

This article re-affirms a truth we have known for a long time: human beings actually set their own targets, and when they do that, the majority set them at an achievable but challenging standard. They are then self-motivated to achieve those targets. If we assume they have the brain-ware and the skills to do it, then all Management needs to do is support, encourage, provide feedback, and often – Get Out Of the Way!!

We always hear in discussions about motivating the workforce, that once we have established a clear objective, then employees will become more motivated to get things done because they know what to achieve and where they want to be. This is not only true in our day-to-day conversation in work place settings; it is also true in a more scientific discussion amongst scholars. But current discussion is no longer whether or not organisation should set goals. Rather, it has been shifted to how organisations could identify the right goals that can motivate their employees.

Before we start a more in depth discussion about how goal setting can motivate employees, let’s see what motivation really means. There are many definitions of motivation proposed by scholars. Principally, all the available definitions of motivation concern about factors or events that

Give energy to
direct
maintain human behaviour over time

Goal Setting Approach

Now, let us explore the goal setting approach that has been employed by many organisations to increase their effectiveness.

There had been significant growth of the number of organisations which use a goal setting approach to increase their employees’ motivation (Yearta et al., 1995; Gibson et al., 2003; Kerr and Landauer, 2004). As Locke and Latham (2002) put it, “a goal is the object or aim of an action” and it is similar in meaning to the notion of purpose and intent.

The effectiveness of a goal, and attitudes towards it are affected by

how much confidence does the individual have in being able to achieve the goal
what will be the benefits from success in achieving the goal
how much has the individual been involved in the goal setting

These factors will determine one’s strategies to accomplish the goal, which will lead to performance (within the constraints of ability). (Arnold et al., 2005)

So, what does it mean to organisations who wish to set goals for their employees to motivate them? The answer is quite simple, actually. First of all, the organisation must understand that:

Specific goals lead to higher performance than “do your best” goals.

This simply means that organisations must cascade their strategic objectives into a specific set of goals for their individual employees.

Most organisations have tried to do this by identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each and every employee in their organisation.

Also, since goal setting can be applied to groups (Mitchell et al., 2000), organisations usually embed this process into their goal setting activities. As long as the individual goals are consistent with group’s goals, it can enhance the group performance (Arnold et al., 2005)

This is increasingly true in modern organisations where most of the time, the individual employee is expected to work well in a team to achieve organisational goals.

Hard goals lead to bigger effort than easy goals.

The phrase in vogue is ‘stretch’ goals. But there is a balance – a stretch to far will quickly de-motivate (see above for ‘self-confidence’, and below for ‘commitment’)

This is linked directly to employees’ commitment to the identified goals. The importance of goals, along with employee’s confidence, will affect goal commitment. Employees will not commit to goals where they doubt the importance, or the importance is not signalled clearly by management.

Goals are more likely to be achieved when employees are committed to their goals. To promote employees’ commitment, organisations might set challenging goals. However, caution is needed to ensure that each employee has been equipped with necessary tools, skills, and knowledge, along with the right attitude, to be able to conquer the set challenges.

In other words, organisations might need to train and develop their employees’ technical and soft competencies first before they can expect the employees to meet their expectation. If employees feel that the organisation has not give them the necessary equipment to meet their objectives, then the organisation risks the employees becoming sceptical and de-motivated.

Goal setting is dependent on the complexity of the job

The effect of goal setting is lower in highly complex jobs than in simpler tasks.

Thus, organisation with complex sets of tasks will need to be more careful on setting their goals compared to organisations whose to do list is simpler. For instance, a finance consulting firm will need a bigger effort to identify specific and challenging goals for its consultants compared to the manufacturing organisation who needs to set goals for their rank and file staff.

Once organisations understand these basic principles in setting goals for their employees, they still have one important activity that they must do in order to ensure their goal-setting success: giving continuous feedback.

In order to make goal setting effective, feedback on the progress made in relations to each employee’s goals is needed to facilitate their adjustment concerning the level and/or direction of their effort, and/or the level of their performance.

Most organisations conduct this feedback formally through their Performance Appraisal once a year, twice at the most. Well, most of the time, this is not sufficient.

Logically speaking, you won’t be able to ‘fix’ anything if you found out that you are way behind target when you have already reached your deadline. So, to ensure that you are on the right track, it will be best if you also adopt the ‘monitoring’ approach, in addition to ‘evaluating’ your employees’ performance.

Monitoring might be conducted through your monthly, weekly, or even daily meeting. And you can document your performance through your minutes of meeting. A more sophisticated approach would be monitoring performance through the live system, such as ERP.

Having read the basic guidelines on goal setting, one might ask: ‘So, how exactly do goals affect performance?’ Well, Locke and Latham (2002) suggested that goals affect performance in four ways:

1. Goals direct attention and effort toward goal-related behaviour and away from that unrelated to it

2. Goals have an energising effect. Difficult (but possible to accomplish) goals initiate greater effort than easy goals.

3. Goals affect one’s persistence. A study shows that when participants are allowed to control the duration of time to finish a task, high goals prolong effort.

4. Goals indirectly affect action by leading to the arousal, discovery, and/or use of task-relevant knowledge and strategies.

Back to the definition of motivation on the earlier part of this article and based on all the discussion above, we can say that goals can energise, direct, and sustain desired behaviours, including employees’ effort to achieve the set objectives. Most importantly, they release that drive of ‘discretionary effort’ that distinguishes superior performance from the mechanistic following of procedures that marks out the mediocre performer.

Through careful and involved goal-setting, and on-going discussion and monitoring, organisations can motivate their employees by identifying the right goals which could then lead to increase organisations’ effectiveness and efficiency.

—-

By Lita Dewi

References

Arnold, J., Silvester, J., Patterson, F., Robertson, I., Cooper, C., and Burnes, B. (2005) Work Psychology: Understanding Human Behaviour in the Workplace, 4th edition. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Gibson, J.L, Ivanchevich, J.M., Donelly, J.H., and Konopaske, R. (2003) Organozations: Behavior Structure Processes, 11th edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher education.

Kerr, S. and Landauer, S. (2004) Using Stretch Goals to Promote Orrganizational Effectiveness and Personal Growth: General Electric and Goldman Sachs. Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 18, No. 4, 134-138.

Locke, E.A. and Latham, G.P. (2002) Building a Practicality Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation. American Psychologist, Vol. 57, No. 9, 705-717. The American Psychological Association, Inc..

Mitchell, T.R., Thompson, K.R., and George-Falvy, J. (2000) GOAL Setting: Theory and Practice. In [ed.s] Cooper, C.L. and Locke, E.A. (2000) Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Linking Theory with Practice. Blackwell Business.

Yearta, S.K., Maitlis, S., and Briner, R.B. (1995) An Explanatory Study of Goal Setting in Theory and Practice: A Motivational Technique that Works?. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 68, 237-252. Great Britain: The British Psychological Society.

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Best answer:

Answer by Tanya
There are various theories of motivation that have been applied to this question. You could apply the “need for achievement” research and try to set up conditions that would best support each employee. For example, those with a high need for achievement would do best with challenging but doable tasks. Another approach is from Maslow, who theorized about motivation from the perspective of how essential a need is. For example, if you are starving, you are more motivated to find food than to worry if your hair is nicely combed. You could try to figure out where in his sequence the employee is and help that employee achieve that kind of need (e.g., self-esteem, approval, belonging). Optimal arousal is another theory of motivation that posits that we strive to find activities that bring us adequate stimulation. For example, if you are sitting alone at home, you might be motivated to find stimulation that will arouse your nervous system, such as call a friend, or turn on the television, or dance.

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