Dianna Podmoroff - 365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees Every Day: With Little or No Money

TO MOTIVATE AND REWARD

Your Employees Every Day With Little or No Money

Dianna Podmoroff, BA, MBA, CHRP

365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees Every Day With Little or No Money

Atlantic Publishing Group, Inc. Copyright 2005
1210 SW 23rd Place Ocala, Florida 34474 800-814-1132 352-622-5836Fax

Web site:

SAN Number :268-1250

All rights reserved. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. No warranty is implied. The information is provided on an as is basis.

International Standard Book Number: 0-910627-51-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Podmoroff, Dianna.

365 ways to motivate and reward your employees every day-with little or no

money / Dianna Podmoroff.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-910627-51-7 (alk. paper)

1. Incentives in industry. 2. Employee motivation. I. Title: Three

hundred and sixty-five ways to motivate and reward your employees every

day-with little or no money. II. Title.

HF5549.5.I5P58 2005

658.314--dc22

2005015287

A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also the Vice President of Sunshine here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.

Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean, Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love. He made a lot of people smile every day.

We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bears memory to local animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need of assistance.

Douglas and Sherri Brown

PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.

Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement today:

• Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
• Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
• Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
• Be a developer put up some birdhouses.
• Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
• Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
• Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
• Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
• Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
• If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
• Support your local farmers market.
• Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.

Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste, choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.

Introduction

If theres one topic of conversation that permeates most business productivity issues, its employee motivation. And the usual complaint is that the employees at company XYZ are not motivated.The managers moan, Where can I find motivated employees? No one seems to have the answer. Does this train of thought sound familiar?

Motivated employees are found in lots of other workplaces, so why cant we find and hire them to work for us? We seem to have no end of qualified applicants, so we must be doing something right in recruitment and hiring. How come we cant seem to predict which employees will turn out to be star performers?

Even the sharpest and most refined recruitment and hiring strategies are no match for the culprits of employee de-motivation. At the root of the problem is the fact that you dont find motivated employees; you provide motivating environments for employees.

Most employees start off with very good intentions, but if their contributions to your workplace go unnoticed and unappreciated day after day, month after month, and yes, sometimes even year after year, even the brightest star begins to fade and die away.

Its not all dismal, though; you have the power to motivate! Notice I said motivate, not coerce, force, cajole, badger or even convince. Motivation is not something that comes from the outside and it cant be faked or put-on to please someone else. Zig Ziglar said it best when he stated that his role was not to motivate anyonepeople motivate themselves. His job was to enlighten people and awake an enthusiasm within themselves.

Trying to motivate someone to do something is like putting the cart before the horse. You must first create an appealing and motivating work environment, and after that, employees will do what comes natural: work hard for someone who recognizes and appreciates them. It would be pretty darn hard to come to work and do a slack job for a boss who supported you, encouraged you, respected you, and genuinely cared for you.

And that exact notion is the foundation for this book. I will talk about ways to create a motivating culture, and I will include tips and techniques and specific examples to try. These techniques, though, are simply the tip of the motivation iceberg. They are the tangible rewards, activities and recognitions that everyone sees. The real power of motivation lies in what is going on under the surface: how strong, how genuine, how real is your commitment to provide meaningful and rewarding work? Ultimately, the question that remains is:

How motivated are you to
provide a motivating workplace?

Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.

Donald Trump

Chapter 1: A LESSON LEARNED: MY OWN DISMAL FORAY INTO MOTIVATION

You dont have to change that much for it to make a great deal of difference. A few simple disciplines can have a major impact on how your life works out in the next 90 days, let alone in the next 12 months or the next 3 years.

Jim Rohn

When I was first out of graduate school, fresh with my MBA in hand and convinced I knew everything I needed to know about managing people, I accepted a job at a manufacturing company. My job was to create and be the Human Resource department. During the interview process it became clear that this company was struggling with a great many human resource issues that stemmed, in their opinion, from the fact that they had no professional human resource guidance.