Andy Gooday - Love Work: Creative Ideas for Motivating Employees, Improving Retention and Attracting the Best Candidates

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* Source for section: Remote, by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hannson

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First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-9563621-6-2
ISBN: 978-0-9563621-7-9 (ePub)
ISBN: 978-0-9563621-8-6 (Mobi)

Ask the leaders of the worlds most successful companies what their greatest business asset is and they will almost certainly tell you its their people. After all, it has been proven that businesses with a great work place culture achieve three times the return that the average business achieves.

However, attracting and retaining employees who are committed to the success and sustainability of these businesses isnt something that happens by accident. Nor are the things that truly motivate and engage these workforces necessarily the ones that many employers would expect.

How to get the very best out of a workforce is a conundrum that has been faced by businesses since time immemorial, and, of course, the problem is made even more difficult by the fact that the motivational tactics and initiatives that might have been effective 10 or 20 years ago are likely to have little impact today.

However, despite the inescapable differences between generations of workers, todays employers often behave as though theyre stuck in a time warp, trapped in the days before the internet became such an integral part of our everyday lives and when money was the only carrot worth dangling to attract and retain great employees.

Though perhaps worst of all, many of these companies are still under the illusion that the cream of the crop are happy just to be in a job any job.

The result, not surprisingly, is that businesses which often have great potential are losing talented employees to companies which truly understand what makes the current generation tick and can offer a culture that both motivates and inspires them.

However motivating your existing employees and making your company the kind of business that the highest calibre workers want to join is far from beyond your reach and it neednt cost you a fortune. Regardless of your position in your company, you will find many easily achievable ideas you can implement with your team.

In Love Work, we hope to give you an insight into what really matters for todays generation of workers by providing you with inspiration for improving the workplace and culture that you are responsible for, and helping your business to attract and retain the best. It is also our hope that when it comes to hiring key people in your organisation, you will be prompted to consider us as partners who not only care genuinely about innovation in the workplace, but who can also help you find the very best employees.

So lets get started!

Setting up, growing and sustaining a successful business enterprise is challenging, and the task isnt made any easier because the conditions under which businesses operate change over time. Coping successfully with ever changing economies, technologies and consumer trends requires businesses to constantly reassess their products, services, marketing and distribution. Alongside all of this, if businesses are going to become and remain successful, they also have to evolve with the changing values and priorities of their workers.

The attitudes of past generations of workers have been characterised by qualities such as duty, sacrifice and employer loyalty. Their expectations have typically focused on things like financial rewards, better job titles and a job for life. Then along came Generation Y and suddenly everything was turned on its head. Instead of aspiring to that symbolic gold watch and wanting to work in an environment where they were guided by structure, rules and where feedback was unwelcome, this new breed of workers wanted:

• Fun
• Sociability and the chance to work with people who inspired them
• The opportunity to use their creativity
• More training and opportunities
• A series of goals to work towards so that they could see what they had achieved and then have the chance to move on to something new
• Lots of feedback
• Meaning and fulfillment

This new generation also made it very clear that they expected rewards, although not necessarily in the form of the higher salaries and bonuses that their predecessors demanded. Life, for those of Generation Y, isnt about worshipping the god of money. Its about achieving fulfilment in a much wider sense - and thats something that doesnt come with a traditional price tag!

Of course theres no getting away from the fact that any worker who isnt being paid a reasonable wage and receiving basic benefits isnt going to be entirely satisfied with his lot. According to one study, once these basic requirements have been met, the kinds of things that employees really desire are:

• Free beverages
• A smartphone or tablet for their own personal use, and even
• Free shoulder massages

Now, whilst this might seem like a rather odd assortment of requests, when you look a little more closely you can see that what they all have in common is that they contribute to the individual recipients overall sense of fulfilment.

Effectively, employers who provide rewards such as these say to their employees:

I recognise and appreciate you as a human being with a wide range of needs, rather than just another cog in the machine.

This basic need to be recognised as a whole person, as well as an individual with something unique to offer, is high on the list of priorities for todays workers and, I would argue, for every human being. In the workplace though, this isnt something that can simply be achieved by putting a little extra in employees pay packets or offering them a higher salary. In fact, a recent survey conducted by staffing firm Accountemps clearly indicated that recognition is far more highly valued than pay increases and that providing recognition is one of the greatest ways to motivate employees. So money is not the be-all-and-end-all in fact, in many cases what inspires employees to give their very best is something that can be given for free!

Especially in tough economic times when most employers arent in a position to award salary increases and bonuses, this should of course come as great news because the lack of financial reward neednt have too negative an impact on workers levels of motivation to stay with their current employer. In fact, according to a study conducted by