Motivating Employees Without Money – The Psychology Of Behavior Change

I wrote a blog post recently on Motivating Employees Without Money where I talk about different techniques you can use to motivate your workforce without giving out money. You have to understand how to motivate people from a psychological standpoint.

Motivation comes from several factors but how do you keep behaviors going after motivation fades? Motivation does fade but habits are more permanent. You have to make tasks that are done through motivation into a habit. For example: your staff goes from having a staff meeting a day where you just make excuses about issues to having 2-3 shorter staff meetings where you find root causes and fix the root cause instead of ignoring the problem or putting in a band-aid. How do you make sure you make these behavior changes permanent because it is hard to fix root cause issues?

Here is a simple model to use: Behavior changes = Attitude changes & Attitude changes = Behavior changes. What this means is that if you change your behaviors your attitude will eventually change to match your behaviors and if you change your attitude your behaviors change to match your attitude. This can be a powerful tool for you if you have behavior and/or attitude changes due to motivation to change.

What I have noticed is that you have to keep the behavior going and If you can you will have a much easier time to make changes permanent. Here are four ways to make the transition easier:

1) Standardize = Make your changes permanent by making it the standard. Tasks are performed in an x,y,z manner.
2) Make changes visible = Making things visible makes people accountable. If you are not fixing root causes to your problems it is much harder to do than band aid a process. To make sure you keep fixing root cause have a tracking board that is reviewed daily with status updates and owners.
3) Measure the right things = People respect what you inspect. It depends on what you want to change but you may consider going from machine utilization as a metric to total facility processing type.
4) Provide quick and accurate feedback = The longer you wait to teach after a mistake the less effective the feedback. Feedback should be as close to instant as possible to drive true change.