Last week, I ranted a little bit about motivational meetings. Today I’ll make the opposite case.
Why have motivational meetings?
The right way to use motivational meetings is to reaffirm the purposes of the group, and help people to connect the dots between their individual efforts and the collective goals of the group, and to connect those goals with their own individual aspirations.
Basically, motivating people is easy:
- Give them work that is meaningful to them and to the organization
- Treat them with respect
Treating people with respect includes paying them a fair wage, and not doing any of these things.
Among other things it also means not letting people who aren’t contributing to the common goals of the organization hold back the group by not doing their job.
Research has shown that one of the survey questions most highly correlated with motivation and performance is:
Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
Which is another way of saying does your boss respect you. At the same time the single highest correlation for any question was:
I get to do what I do best everyday at work.
So, it’s really important to line people’s intrisic skills and internal long-term motivational drivers with the work you ask them to do.
If you’re not doing those two things, motivational meetings are a loss. If you are doing them you can use a meeting to remind people of how their deeper motivations are connected to what they are doing now.
P.S. My info on the top questions and their correlation to performance comes from Gallop research via the very interesting book First Break All the Rules, which is one of the best, and most evidence based, books on managing for exceptional performance I’ve read.