Good to see you all back! Today, we'd an interesting assignment from our VP in the organization I work for, who challenged all managers to come up with ways and means to shoot down the 'what-is-my-motivation-to-do-this-work syndrome that haunts some parts of our organization. Thought and thought on the subject, and here are my few Indian paise!
- Celebrate employees' day and Managers' day in the company. This idea can also be extended to an HR day, an engineering day, a finance day etc! On this day, highlight all good stuff that the respective team did during the whole year (or since the last time, the day was celebrated); publish it. call for a dedicated meeting held in the company premises for all employees, honour the achievers.
- Encourage celebrating employee birthdays at team level; this is normally done in all teams, but the difference is in the innovative way employed in collecting money into the b'day kitty - Penalize the last guy (or who doesn't attend at all) that comes into the regular team meetings. If there are people that missed attending, money can be levied from those guys too. Given that a team typically has 4 team meeings in a week, we can collect Rs.100/- in a month, if we collect Rs.25/- per guy! ON the specific day, team makes a dramatic presentation a of small momemto to the birthday guy. What a fun!
- Must celebrate all the various days - Mother's day, Father's day, Valentines day etc. Identify the event co-ordinator (only employees) during such days, which could again be through some interesting system - who will plan out all activities for the day. Separate budget allocation needed. Hold games, competitions at a common location within the office campus, where people may come and join, whenever they wish. Restrict the people that may join the celebrations. For example, only mothers can attend Mother's day, Fathers can attend father's day. HR should actively participate in all these and should come up with some mechanism to decide on the genuinity of the respective class of attendees!
- Make it a practice at the HR team, at least to send personalized greetings to all the people on their birth/marriage anniversaries etc.
- Encourage people to celebrate the little things that they achieve. This gives them a sense of accomplishment.
- Rotate lead/management responsibilities - not all, but certain, like conducting meetings that normally leads/managers conduct.
- Open house sessions with Sr.management, once a month; I don't think this needs any explanation.
- Prevention is definitely better than cure; start the people welfare activities early on, and don't give the impression that the management is trying to patch up something, when something irreristably appreciable is observed about the guy. Have team building exercises more often.
- Finally, involve HR/facilities team increasingly in deciding all people related stuff - Rewards/recognition, Work culture. I've heard certain wonderful ideas from these guys in the past - infact, anybody who works in a people supervisor role.
