In this age of cheaper-faster-better it is resource management that is critical to organization survival. The resource that is the biggest organization challenge to manage is motivation. To drive organization health both internal, employee, motivation as well as external, customer, motivation need alignment.
Each day when the closing bell chimes, whether that bell chimes in your head or on the production floor, the organization, management and leaders need to be fully aware the employee who left for home often comes back with a completely different mindset tomorrow. Organization risk is expecting an equally motivated employee returning the next morning.
Leaders, managers, and coworkers are all under intense pressure to manage their motivation to show up at work and deliver within themselves, yes, and within their organization.
An added complexity to motivate comes when juggling our own professional motivation as well as the motivation of others to work with and for you.
A rule of thumb I adopted from project management estimations is to only expect 6 hours of effective work from an employee per day. No matter how long they work, 8, 10, 16 hours, do not expect more than 6 hours of progress towards a goal (project).
The motivation challenge takes on added gravity when an organization identifies the motivation linkage that each employee has to motivate the customer.
In talent management many times a customer is defined as an internal customer or external customer. I strategically agree with this, but I would like to direct all eyes to only the external customer and the concept that strategically and tactically every action an employee has should relate to revenue. No customer, no revenue. No revenue, no job.
The current customer, potential customer, or lost customer is motivated towards only those services or products that meet their need. Marketing today has put the ball firmly in the court of customer transparency. What motivates and influences a customer is the degree their problem is solved; in both for-profit and not-for-profit worlds.
Today your customer can reach out to any social connection to get advice, testimonial, caution, or endorsement. I look at this ability as less crowdsourcing and more crowdsurfing to find answers. Brand loyalty is a hope and hope is not much of a strategy.
The bottom line to your organization really is managing motivation as a finite resource. And to look at motivation as a resource that is easily expendable, easily stored, easily dissipated, and easily wasted.
Adding to this challenge is that the sum of the parts of organization motivation and customer motivation will never equal 100%.
Managers maximize resources. Motivation is a resource. Managed by both the employee and the customer and can not be mutually exclusive to be collectively exhaustive.
Leaders motivate the future state. Motivation is required to journey to the future state. The future is opt-in-only by both the employee and the customer and can not be mutually exclusive to be collectively exhaustive.
How can you manage motivation? Knowledge and communication. Not an either or/neither nor option, but to build confidence, knowledge and communication transparency is critical.
No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.
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