THE ENTHUSIASTIC EMPLOYEE

Enthusiastic employees out-produce and outperform employees who are not motivated to perform. Most people are enthusiastic when they’re hired. What happens to dampen their enthusiasm? Management.

Managers spend too much time dealing with difficult employees. The biggest problem is the vast number of workers who aren’t openly troublesome but who have become indifferent to the organization and its goals.

How does a company tackle this kind of problem? It can operate in one of two ways: It can pressure employees to do more or it can treat its workers to a series of rah-rah events, speakers and programs. Neither approach will do much good.

There is little conflict between the goals of management and those of employees. The key question us not how to motivate workers, but how to sustain –and prevent management from destroying –the motivation that employees naturally bring to their jobs.

Every successful company has to address three crucial factors: equity, achievement, and camaraderie.

Employee enthusiasm results in enormous competitive advantages for those companies with the strength of leadership to manage for real long-term results.

The Three Factor Theory of Human Motivation in the Workplace
There are three primary sets of goals of people at work: equity, achievement, and camaraderie.

1. These three sets of goals are what the overwhelming majority of people want.
2. No other goals are nearly as important.
3. These goals haven’t changed over time.
4. When your organization works to achieve these goals, the result will be high work-force morale and firm performance.

Human Motivation
The essentials of human motivation have changed very little over time, but management is acting in a different way and is reaping the consequences. As an example, if you treat workers like disposable commodities, which began to happen with the downsizings of the late ‘80’s and the ‘90’s you should not be surprised that workers are no longer “loyal.”

Employee Enthusiasm and Business Success
Many companies have enjoyed long-term success –ranging from Barron’s Magazine to the Mayo Clinic to Starbucks. They share one thing: the morale of their workers is much higher than most other companies. The higher morale of their workers is a result of specific policies and practices that engender enthusiasm in their employees about their jobs and their companies.

About 16.4 percent of the business units surveyed can be characterized as having highly discontented and perhaps, hostile work forces. Hostility differs from enthusiasm, but they are both highly motivated states that impel people into action. Anger is primarily a product of a sense of injustice. The motivation of a hostile employee is to do less and somehow harm the organization.

The People Performance Model
• People and their morale matter tremendously for business success, including customer satisfaction.
• Employee morale is a function of the way an organization is led.
• Success breeds success. The better the individual and organization perform, the greater the employee morale is, which in turn boosts performance.

Research shows a strong correlation between pride in the organization and the overall satisfaction of workers with that organization. People want to work for an organization that does well but also does good.

There are four main sources of employee pride:

 Excellence in the organization’s financial performance.
 Excellence in the efficiency with which the work of the organization gets done.
 Excellence in the characteristics of the organization’s products such as their usefulness distinctness and quality.
 Excellence in the organization’s moral character.

The first two of these factors relate to doing well and the latter two relate to doing good.

Motivated By Camaraderie
People don’t want to come to work to fight. Although employees derive pleasure from associating with others, such as during breaks, their greatest satisfaction comes from interacting as a team on the job in the service common performance goals.

The Total Organization Culture and How to Change It
A partnership culture is the surest path to a high-performance organization.

Partnership organizations emerge when senior leadership—in most cases it has been the CEO—has the foresight to see what can be and not just what is.