Motivation for money-driven employees

[iya gustilo]

Do you have alternative strategies on how to motivate money-driven employees when the organization is cutting on costs?

[Ray Baumruk]

You might consider opportunities to reward employees for identifying and executing on cost savings opportunities with a financial reward that is some portion of the savings realized. This allows employees looking for additional pay, but also supports the overall effort of the company to identify cost reductions. This type of initiative needs to be well planned and executed carefully though as you don't want to motivate unproductive behavior such as having an employee drive up costs only to suggest reductions later and get rewarded for it. Also challenging is when it takes a collaboration among many to get the real cost savings (which is where the larger $$ come from anyway), how to reward the group. Overall, best programs around this tend to avoid excessive payouts which motivate "game playing", but are large enough to motivate interest.

[Peter A Hunter]

Iya
Alfie Kohn in his book "Punished by Rewards" suggests that money driven employees are driven by money because their money driven system of rewards made them that way.
You are simply asking how can we get our employees back to the more natural state of affairs where their wage looks after their mortagage, vacations, childrens education etc,and what really motivates them at work is how what they do makes them feel about themselves.

To do this is difficult because management are not accustomed to behaving in a way that makes their employees feel good about what they do.
That is why management provide financial incentives because it means they don't have to worry about how they behave towards their workforce.

In order to remove the financial incentives you have to have the alternative in place and a quick chat will not fix it.

Alfie Kohns book is a great place to start, McGregor's "The Human side of Enterprise" is good as are most others reviewed at. http://www.breakingthemould.co.uk/?q=New%20BtM%20Book

What you are trying to do is replace monetary rewards with dignity, respect, value and support.

The people who can do that are the managers but they have to be helped to understand how to do it and what are the consequences for performance when they do.

Peter A Hunter
www.breakingthemould.co.uk

[Susan Stamm]

I agree with Peter. I am working from the assumption that the folks in question are being paid a fair living wage. That is, a fair reasonable wage is being provided for their good effort. I'd like to continue with Peter's thread and add another thought. Managers often think employees are only motivated by money. I believe their thoughts and expectations help drive this kind of thinking on their teams.

In working with managers, I often ask them how they'd personally view a raise they'd get...as a reward for "past" performance? Or as an incentive to motivate them to do more in the future? Of course, they always answer that they see it as a reward for past performance. This helps them to begin to see that money does not really motivate. If they can shift their thinking they may find their employees shift with them.

Susan Stamm
Author, 42 Rules of Employee Engagement