Assessment one: UNDERSTANDING HOW TO MOTIVATE TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE

Define the term motivation
Motivation can be defined in a number of ways. It is a word used to refer to the reason or reasons for engaging in a particular behaviour that involves hard-work and effort. Such as a need, a drive, a desire, a belief to achieve an end goal or an ideal. Motivation drives everything we think, everything we feel and everything we do, from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to sleep at night. (‘’Opportunities don’t just happen, you create them’’ Chris Grosser). Motivation stimulates desire and an energy in people to be continually interested and committed to a job, role or subject to make the effort to attain a goal resulting from the interaction of both conscious and unconscious factors such as the intensity desire or the need to achieve. (“Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly”-Stephen R. Covey”). …………………………………………………………………………………………….

Describe the factors that may affect motivation levels in the workplace

Before a leader can effectively stimulate motivation within his/her group of individuals or members, she/he must be aware of the Factors that can affect motivation, here are some of the factors that I think have affected the motivation levels in my work place.

Pay structure is the first one that I’ll like to start with as this is something I have seen with my own eyes and it has also been the first thing to change in our company under our new management over the last past year or so. Before there was no real kind of pay structure or training for that matter and this I believe affected the motivation levels of some of my co- workers. For example some of the bonuses given at the end of the year where all different and this caused a lot of animosity between some of my colleagues. People on the shop floor would talk and would find out that some others had been given higher bonuses than others and some would disagree about this fact, this is where I saw the problems. The one year two of the teams all got different size bonuses and therefore where very reluctant to help each other and sometimes wouldn’t even talk to each other, which kind of felt like we were working against each other not with one other, even though we all worked for the same company and we were all supposed to have the same end goal. This affected the whole dynamics of the factory as we were supposed to be working in a team but yet because of the pay structuring we were all working or felt this way against each other and not with one another. So I quickly learnt that money can sometimes work against you and not always for you.

Respect is something else that I think can also affect motivation levels in the work place because I remember when I first started working and one of our team leaders at the time used to go mad at we, employees for doing the slightest of things wrong, so over time they were too afraid to approach him for help. So more often than not they wouldn’t know what they were doing but would just carry on, no the less. But this meant that they would just carry on with their jobs whether they were doing them right or wrong with no kind of direction. But then he would have a go at them when their jobs where wrong or patronise them and try and get you to do overtime, even when they didn’t what to or couldn’t. But what happened in the end was people wouldn’t do the over-time for him because of the lack of respect he had for them and they had for him all because he wouldn’t help them, and the ones that did do the overtime for him took no pride in their work because of their lack of respect for him, so it became a vicious circle really, but looking back I guess it was a kind of bulling or scare mongering really, which just didn’t work as for the motivation levels, this was how I think the respect thing