Urgent need to improve employee motivation says Deloitte report – Piers Bishop

So I read in Forbes that the Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends survey 2014 is out.  I wouldn’t hop over there unless you’re feeling brave – it makes depressing reading – you might prefer to stay in this page because we have some solutions for all this angst and aggravation.  In a summary that will have most managers worrying about the employee motivation levels at their companies, Josh Bersin reveals that:

• Over 85% of leaders think their leadership pipeline is inadequate, a problem that nearly 40% think is urgent
• Nearly 80% have a significant engagement and retention problem, and over a quarter think this is urgent
• A similar proportion think their HR skills are insufficient to sort this out
• There’s a serious recruitment problem, with 75% struggling to get the right people for the top of the organisation
• Employee engagement is a serious problem, with less than 20% considering their workforce properly engaged

Bersin asks, not unreasonably, what is going on here?  At the beginning of an economic recovery people ought to be happy about their employment prospects, so why are these employee motivation problems so evident now?  His conclusion is that today’s employees want something new – they expect work to be meaningful and rewarding in many ways, and they expect their employer to provide that somehow.  It isn’t happening, though –  employees think they are working too many hours, they are terribly distracted (not least by checking their mobile devices 150 times a day), and they increasingly feel anxious and overwhelmed.

Clearly, companies need to do something about this, and the place where any initiatives would likely be found is the annual review or appraisal process.  But that doesn’t work either – only 6% of leaders think their performance management system is worth the time it takes to run it, and nearly 60% think their performance management process is “weak”.

None of this muddle is going to make for a motivated, productive, collaborative, creative and loyal team.  But it is rapidly becoming ‘the way things are’, and while there’s a certain amount of hand-wringing going on, something more definite is needed.  The first step, as in any useful change, will have to be getting some information: who is suffering what, out of all the possible things that could be derailing work satisfaction, engagement and performance?

Enough of the problems, lets have some answers – it’s time to step back and do some thinking, and this is where we can help. It is perfectly possible to create conditions where employee motivation can thrive – see the Performance Review Pro 4C model for Intelligent Performance for the things you need to get in place.  It’s not rocket science, either, though you will have to ask a number of questions to find out where the difficulties lie for each individual employee. This free e-book will show you what sort of questions you would need to ask, and why they are important.

This is one of those places where technology can help – Performance Review Pro will do the leg-work of ask your employees some judiciously-chosen questions, then do some analysis and present you with a dashboard that shows you exactly who is suffering and why.  It then gives you an action list of practical steps you can take with each employee, and each team, to get those difficulties out of the way so productivity and satisfaction can improve.

You can use it once, to shake up the workplace and get some clarity into your leadership and management processes.  Many of our users run it two or four times a year as the spine of their learning and development process, feeding back the issues it uncovers and using them as the spur to make work better for everyone.

Bersin ends by asking readers to face a simple fact: “If you’re a CEO or business leader, the only thing you really have is your employees’ commitment and engagement. This is not ‘one of the things’ to worry about, this is ‘the thing’ to worry about.” Well, with Performance Review Pro you don’t have to worry so much, because you’ll be creating the conditions where employee motivation, commitment and engagement will thrive. We’ll show you how much better they could be performing – and what to do to make it happen. Try Performance Review Pro now, free, for ten people in your team.

About Performance Review Pro

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