There’s a reason you get up, go to work and work hard, right?

Everyone’s reasons and motivation for going to work will vary to some degree. Yes, it would be fair to say regardless of job or profession most people’s motivation to work is underlined by financial circumstance, the basic need to provide shelter, food and of course Wi-Fi for themselves or their family.

Aside from these basic survival needs why do people work? Love of the job? Sense of duty? To contribute? Are they striving to make it to the top of their vocational tree? Or just plodding along with minimum effort?

As a business owner, you could add an extra layer to that broad question to delve deeper and ask what motivates people to be truly engaged, excel and go that extra mile for your business?

I would think a nurse or care giver for example is more likely to be intrinsically motivated when at work, driven more by the emotional reward of helping people than the financial benefits, which, in my opinion should be better. On the other hand, some people are driven more by the financial reward their job delivers. How many times have you heard someone say one of the following statements:

“The money isn’t great, but I love the job and can’t imagine doing anything else”

“The job's not great but the money is good so I can’t complain”

At face value, which statement would you say belongs to the most engaged and motivated employee? You could argue both do!

To be fair those examples may represent either end of the motivational spectrum, one emotionally driven and one financial. I would expect, if you asked most people to be completely honest they would probably sit somewhere between the two. And in my opinion, that’s perfectly reasonable - we need a balance of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators to do most things in life.

Why should you care? - The “so what” question! It’s pretty obvious that there will be a correlation between employee engagement and business performance. Engaged and motivated employees will work harder for you! Research conducted by ISR and Mercer Data concluded that it only takes a 5% increase in positive employee attitude and engagement to increase sales performance by 2.1%. The same studies found unmotivated and disengaged employees will increase staff turnover, are more likely to take sick days and cost UK businesses up to £48bn per annum. The CIPD also conclude that engaged employees deliver 4 times more value to an organisation than non-engaged employees.

Now, assuming that people can be motivated by different things and in different ways, it would make sense that employees are rewarded, encouraged and receive praise and recognition in different ways. A ‘one size fits all’ engagement strategy and incentive solution may be over-rewarding some and de-motivating others.

At Incentivesmart we pride ourselves in being able to offer bespoke employee and customer engagement, incentive and reward programmes and solutions to businesses of all sizes across both B2B & B2C markets.

If you’d like to discuss your current strategy and how this could potential be improved, get in touch with us today or book a demo to see our employee engagement platform in action.