Here is a question from Andrew: How do you motivate your employees?

My answer is: I do not and I cannot motivate my employees.  They motivate themselves.

I thought I could motivate employees.  And so, I raised my salaries, improved on benefits and included free uniforms, travel, 14th and 15th month pay, etc. Sometimes these worked, most of the times, these did not.

This was when I learned that we can never motivate others.  We can only motivate ourselves.  This is because motivation comes from within a person.

We can offer perks, but at the end, it will be the employee who will decide if this is something that they should work hard for or not.

The framework I use for this is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  It classifies human needs into 5 levels and enumerates the needs they have at each level.  Even if it first originated as a hierarchy of needs, what I found is that at all times, each employee has all the 5 levels of needs in varying degrees.

So, what the employee wants and what she needs is dictated by her circumstances.  Each employee is unique.  

As business owners, we need to find out what motivates each employee and be ready to offer it to them so that they will be motivated to deliver.

When you grow your people, they will, in turn, help you grow your business.

Learn more from my book Grow Your Business, Pinoy!: Your Practical and Proven Roadmap on How You Can Make More Money by Doing Less.

In the next posts, we’ll talk more about how you can grow your people to grow your business, so that you can continue to make more money by doing less.

In what ways have you motivated your employees? Share them with us in the comments.

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