How To Motivate Employees? Read The Enthusiastic Employee

The book review is a gateway for how to motivate employees on your team. Decide now to create and support a team of enthusiastic employees, who want to work hard to experience outstanding results!

If you’re looking for proven ways of increasing the performance of your organization while at the same time building employee loyalty and production, you’ve come to the right place.

Few would argue that the most enthusiastic employees tend to outperform their less motivated peers.

Yet it takes strong and thoughtful leadership to provide the spark to motivate employee team members, to rally in times of stress or when teams are focused on a difficult challenge.

The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want provides a great resource to leaders seeking to infuse enthusiasm into their workplace.

When learning to motivate employees on your team, you must recognize that there is one major thing that tends to dampen the spirits of the enthusiastic employee – that one thing, unfortunately, is MANAGEMENT.

When it comes to motivating employees, there are 33 beliefs of most managers that have little or no basis in reality. These “myths” cover several areas and when applied to the typical employee or work group, do little to motivate team members or support increased productivity. These myths often contradict each other.

Leaders looking to motivate employee teams must beware of blindly buying into any of these common myths.

Myths On How To Motivate Employees

The Enthusiastic Employee provides supporting research debunking these ideas.

Seven Of the 33 Myths include:

1. Employees only care about their compensation package
2. No matter how high, people will never be satisfied with what they earn
3. Public recognition is an great replacement for monetary incentives
4. Employees sharing in the corporate earnings is a tremendous incentive for improved performance
5. To continue to thrive with mounting competition, businesses must pay lower wages
6. Employees won't produce if they sense a large disparity in pay between them and their supervisor
7. People who are are confident in having a secure position will become complacent

Six Sources Of Motivation

Contrary to the above myths, The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want identifies opportunity for a true sense of achievement from six primary sources.

Master the use of these six sources in order to motivate employee teams effectively:

1. Challenge of the work itself. - The extent that an employee can use and develop their intelligence, skills and/or abilities.
2. Acquiring of new skills. - An enthusiastic employee is one who is growing and expanding his or her library of knowledge and resources.
3. Ability to perform. - You can more easily motivate employee teams when they are receiving the training, direction, resources, authority, information and cooperation needed to perform well.
4. Perceived importance of the employee’s job. - An enthusiastic employee feels strongly that his efforts are important and provides value to the organization, to the customer, and to society.
5. Recognition received for performance. - The enthusiastic employee needs and appreciates both monetary (compensation) and non-monetary (simple “thank you” from manager or customer).
6. Working for a company of which the employee can be proud. - It’s easy to improve employee engagement and enthusiasm when they have pride in the organization’s purpose, products, business success, ethics and the quality of its leadership.

In the back of the book there is a useful tool that a leader can leverage to motivate employee teams. It's called "The Readiness Questionnaire".

The Readiness Questionnaire is a short survey that can assist a management team to come to terms with its own views and policies on the subject of employee morale and motivation.

Read The Enthusiastic Employee and lead your team to new levels of professional engagement and productivity. Enjoy the satisfaction you’ll receive when supporting people that are happier in their roles. 

The Readiness Questionnaire is a short survey that can assist a management team to come to terms with its own views and policies on the subject of employee morale and motivation.

Read The Enthusiastic Employee and learn to motivate employees and teams more effectively and enjoy the satisfaction you’ll receive when supporting people that are happier in their roles. 

One last item... a nice tool offered by co-author David Sirota's consulting firm provides this helpful infographic on employee engagement.

Author Bio's

David Sirota owns Sirota Consulting. His work has been featured in national magazines and newspapers.

Louis A. Mischkind has researched organizational effectiveness for 30 years and also works at Sirota Consulting.

Michael Irwin Meltzer also now at Sirota Consulting, practices law for 20 years. 

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