Motivating employees is without doubt a crucial and constant challenge to any business. A motivated team means a highly productive staff that helps you achieve your business goals. So much so that many businesses have started making it a part of their business plan.

Every company has a different motivation strategy – what works for a manufacturing firm is entirely different from a service firm. Then, there are other factors that need to be looked into as well; the hours expected to work, the stress and risk involved in the job, the general benefit package in the organization and what the trend is in that industry. The “trend in that industry” is important simply because you want to motivate and nurture your employee to grow and be successful, but also make sure you retain them. What motivates an employee to stay back with an employer is another blog topic for another day.

One of the main questions that HR policy makers ask themselves is What motivates the employees? While not everyone will be motivated by the same thing, focusing on a list of key motivating programs can help. Your plan can include everything from monetary incentives, rewards and recognition, building programs that support work-life balance, to simply creating a fun, relaxed office environment. The opportunities are endless and the reward substantial. (Source: Americasjobexchange.com “The Importance of Employee Motivation”)

Here are few good reasons for companies to start focusing on employee motivation:

Performance: This is a win-win for the employee and the employer. If the employee is working hard and is being rewarded in a timely and appropriate manner for it, he / she will definitely be motivated to work harder and push the boundaries. This will in turn help the company achieve its goal and grow.

When Management Gurus talk about “performance”, they will not ignore the importance of self-motivation and peer-influence. These two aspects can work perfectly well on their own, but in most cases they are interlinked. When the whole team is motivated to work towards a common goal, the outcome is fast and there is good work-balance within the team. If there is discord or negative influence coming from even a small percentage of the team, the time spent in addressing it, working around it, or eliminating is added effort and time away from the project work. In this situation it’s eventually the team and their performance that suffers. Companies and Management spend a lot of time and money trying to avoid this scenario from taking place, because motivating a distressed team is twice as expensive and effort.

Loyalty: Loyalty according to de Graaf (2011) is a concept that “has normative, symbolic, and emotional connotations” (p. 288). I view loyalty as an agreed upon partnership between an employee and the employer where one says,”you do this for me, and in return I’ll do this for you.” Though this sounds like a negotiation process, when demands from both sides are being satisfied, there comes trust. This is the reason they say “trust is built and not bought.”

In a time and age where employees job hop from one company to another, its becoming all the more important for companies to earn their employees’ trust and loyalty.

Brand building: One thing that companies fail to see is that their employees are their biggest brand-ambassadors. They live by the company’s vision and mission statement and also carry it to the outside world. Employers cannot force their employees to talk in favor of the company, what they feel and think is entirely up to them and this is highly influenced by how they feel motivated or treated in the company. Many research work show that one of the main deciding factors that influence people to take up a job or stay with the current employer is how they see the employees being treated in the company. Glassdoor reviews are a good example to see how a company is truly doing in terms of employee loyalty.

A great culture is not easy to build — it’s why high performing cultures are such a powerful competitive advantage. Yet organizations that build great cultures are able to meet the demands of the fast-paced, customer-centric, digital world we live in. More and more organizations are beginning to realize that culture can’t be left to chance. Leaders have to treat culture building as an engineering discipline, not a magical one. Source: hbr.com “How Company Culture Shapes Employee Motivation” by Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi, Published November 25, 2015