Motivation

Motivation is key to success in the business world, if a company is able to motivate their workers to work hard they will obviously produce great results. It turns out that workers actually become more motivated when they find their work interesting, are faced with increased challenge and when they have an increased amount of responsibility. With the way things are looking at school right now, I could see a big change in how people are motivated to do good work, because it seems like whenever we are faced with an increase in challenge we still don't do much about it, it doesn't seem to motivate us it rather irritates us. Young people now a days seem to complain much more than the generation before us, or so I'm told. This small seeming dilemma could actually be a big obstacle in the future workforce. I also think that school/work motivation comes as you grow up, because I noticed that I didn't have the most motivation to try as hard as I could when I was younger playing sports, but ever since I realised that I didn't have many years left of competitive sports at the rep level, I started to try a lot harder, and grew out of the mindset that not trying was cool.

A big problem that many managers face, is how do you get your employee to become interested in his work? Many times the way to increase motivation is by offering them a salary raise, sometimes a promotion and giving them a new title will actually have relatively the same effect. People like having things to show off, so if you give them a prestigious sounding title, it will make people proud of themselves and they will make sure to work harder to keep the title. People have needs for personal achievement and growth, and most of the time motivation comes from the persons own free will. Stories that are passed down through companies are often motivational, for example take the guys who started Google out of a garage, sharing their story with Google employees shows them that anything is possible if they put their mind to it which will help motivate them to be like the founders. Sometimes you just need to ask employees what they want, you have to get to know what motivates them and then use it to your advantage to maximize their motivation. The last thing that I'm going to touch about is how reward systems can help boost motivation in the workforce also. When  employees work their butts off, they can become motivated when receiving rewards to show that their efforts are appreciated.