Best tactics for getting the most out of your staff: motivation, praise, or simply giving them their own space
At the end of the day, it is vital for companies to close the feedback loop, and provide employees with information about what makes them tick
It may seem obvious, but giving an employee feedback can play a role in the success of any business. Indeed, for the worker themselves, it is at the core of personal and professional growth.
Feedback can help an employee get better at what they do, and not surprisingly employees crave decent feedback on how they are performing. Are they performing tasks effectively, or could they do things in a better way?
Understanding employees, and what motivates them, can lead to huge improvements in productivity.
In a recent study at the UNSW Business School we monitored worker motivation throughout the day in real time using a smartphone, and looked at how it fluctuated in response to how that worker is occupied.
This is crucial – we want to know what motivates them, as opposed to how motivated in general as a person they are. We then provided them with feedback on the ‘triggers’ that increased their motivation.
We looked at mid-level managers. Every couple of hours they would tell us how motivated they are through their mobile device. And we also look at what we call their ‘situation cues’, in other words what they are doing, and how they perceive the situation.