Why Employee Motivation Matters

You’re watching your favorite crime show. The investigating team knows who committed the crime—all the pieces fit together—but they’re missing one key element: a motive.

People have their reasons for doing things. You can’t understand someone’s actions unless you understand their reason/motive/motivation—and that applies to training as well as to crime. Training is a great way to increase employee engagement, but not all training is created equal. Employees aren’t likely to be engaged by training that doesn’t tap into their motivation.

Determining Employee Motivation

Why aren’t your employees doing your processes the way you want them to? Why aren’t they immediately getting on board with your new brand training (/solutions/brand-solutions/)? Why are they awesome at sales but terrible at capturing customer information for further contact?

At AllenComm, we believe in needs analyses. The purpose of a needs analysis is “to make sure we truly understand the root of the performance problem,” including what’s motivating employees in their actions. Through a needs analysis, we can discover that your employees discount certain steps of your process because they don’t understand them, or that they think the new brand is juvenile, or that they don’t feel confident in overcoming customer objections.

Addressing Motivation through Training

Once we understand employee motivation, we can design training to address those behaviors. We may make a video that explains the importance of each step in the process so that your employees know not to discount them. Or we may come up with an interactive simulation that shows how the fun, fresh new brand appeals to customers. Or we’ll put together customer objections case studies that model correct behaviors.

No matter what design we come up with, it’s informed by the employees and their motivation. A training that doesn’t appeal to and engage them is hardly more effective than no training at all.

Achieving the Outcome

How do you know if your training is achieving its objectives? Is it helping employees learn, improving behaviors, and increasing engagement and retention? Or is it falling short of the mark?

Tracking training outcomes is one of the classic challenges of the learning and development sphere. This is something AllenComm is currently focusing on. We’re working with clients to track such metrics as increased employee speed to proficiency, cost savings, decreased customer complaints, reduced turnover, greater numbers of employees completing the training, and more positive comments through learner surveys. Ultimately, which metrics we track and how depends on the industry, client, and employee motivation.

In Conclusion

To make engaging training, you need to tap into your employees’ motivation. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing and even less of an idea of how to motivate them to change. Have you found that tapping into your employees’ motivations has helped your training efforts?