Promotion VS Development

If you have to choose between an opportunity for promotion and advancement or training and development, what would be your choice? It seems most employees have chosen promotion and advancement over training and development and according to Quantum Workplace, there are some interesting relationship between age, tenure in the company and the employee's choice. Assuming the relationship is true, how can companies utilize this finding in their policies and management strategy?

If the findings are true, perhaps companies should look into the age of an employee and the impact of the employee's promotion. Would shortening the time to be promoted increases motivation and retention rate for younger employees in the company? Maybe companies need to create new intermediate job titles between two current positions to do so. Companies can also based on the findings to refine their intensity and extensivity of their training and development programme for certain age group and tenure in the company. Does that help to keep your employees?

Apparently, more work has to be done to understand how age and tenure of an employee influence our motivational factors and behaviors to devise appropriate policy to have an impact but let's try and see what we can draw from these findings. The following are merely assumptions and yet to be proven, if there are other studies that support my stand or show otherwise, please let me know.

I see age as an time indication of personal experience shaping our values in the way we do things, our beliefs in consequences to our actions, the character of the type of person we want to be and our attitude influencing our behavior. Time itself does not change us but as we grow, our ability to learn and internalize our experience in seek of happiness changes the way we think. Therefore, perhaps it is due to our young state of mind, and the constant reminder of education to get a rewarding job with good compensation and benefits, we desire for recognition, seeking immediate returns for our efforts. We pursue career advancement and focused our efforts in seek of these desires.

These desires never left us but as we age, we start to develop a different state of mind where personal growth and job satisfaction motivates more than recognition and immediate returns. In this case, I am assuming that career success and compensation and benefits corresponds proportionately to age, the older you are, the more well-off you become and that makes you less sensitive to extrinsic motivations. Therefore, there is a shift of preference from promotion and advancement to training and development along with the age of the respondents.

If that is the case, how are intrinsic and extrinsic motivations working us? What is the impact of the different motivations to different groups of employees? Is it true that extrinsic motivations has an increasingly diminishing impact on employees where paying twice the salary will not double the employee's motivation and that the increase in the employee's motivation decreases as the pay increases then what would be the optimal amount to pay? Besides that, how can we utilize intrinsic motivations which are arguably more influential than extrinsic motivations to motivate employees?

Well, I have many questions. But first, promotion or development? I choose training and development. How about you?

Communication plays a vital role in Performance Management

As companies prepare to compete in the 21st century, their ability to innovate and create value has become increasingly more valuable than the sheer numbers on the balance sheet. Technology companies that did not generate revenue are valued more now than ever. It is no wonder why many companies invest heavily in performance management system as we slowly realized that humans are the core of organizations, not for the functioning of organization's operation but due to our ability to think. The performance management system in the 21st century is thus designed to bring out the best of every individual, or is it not?

Many would agree that in order to develop a effective performance management system, companies need to identify the key expected results, translated into departments' objectives and individual targets. This will help to align every individual to the company's goals. Through understanding how their efforts contribute to the bigger picture, employees have a  higher sense of involvement in the company's achievements. However, this is usually not consistently implemented across the entire organization with employees failing to understand how their work link to the company's success or even their personal success. The misalignment is mainly due to the lack of proper communication strategy within the company.

A good performance communication plan should establish agenda, frequent, timely to reinforce the objectives, transparent and objective-oriented. Besides communicating the objectives and establishing targets for the year during the annual performance review, managers should also conduct periodic performance review to recognize outstanding performance and feedback on areas of improvement. It is also for managers to understand the thoughts behind the action and clarify any concerns of the employees. 

This periodic communication removes doubts, distrusts, and develops long lasting relationships with your employees. Motivation is like an asset, it depreciates over time. A timely talk would help in rekindling the passion for the work as well as ensuring employees are on the same page as their managers. This may be time consuming but necessary. As mentioned in the post "Managers are the key to performance management", the secret to high performance is autonomy, mastery and purpose. All of which requires an effective communication system to work, be it finding the purpose of work, establishing expectations and career milestones or giving autonomy to independent workers.

In order to ensure proper communication and performance management procedures are carried out, there had to be certain measures in place. This is also to resolve some of the issues with current performance management system. Some of these setbacks includes the failure of managers to effectively communicate objectives, performance criteria and expectations and the inability to quantify all expectations to measurable targets. One of the ways to reduce these concerns is for a third party to communicate directly to the employees on their understanding of objectives, evaluation criteria and the ratings indicators, comparing it to the standards set by the managers. Another would be to provide an alternative communication channel for the employees to express their concerns.

Good communication system promotes understanding and motivates employees while ineffective communication creates misunderstandings and management issues. How do you suggest improving the communication in the workplace? What are the measures that you had put in place? Comment below and let me know.