Businesses take steps to understand staff motivation

But how many people really understand the fundamental things that drive them and those around them - and use that knowledge effectively? Not enough people, according to Michael Moran, executive director of HR consultancy group Penna City.

Yet from an organisation's point of view, especially in a people-centred business like banking, keeping talented people motivated enough to stay is one of management's Holy Grails.

From an individual's point of view, motivation is important to both success and happiness few of us excel when we are unmotivated and, even if we can carry it off for a while, it is unlikely to bring much satisfaction or joy.

A huge amount of work has been done in this area, dividing motivations into different categories and devising tests to help people understand what drives them.

However, one of the earliest experts on the subject, whose theories provide the basis for tests still used today, also produced one of the simplest categorisations of basic drivers.

According to David McClelland, a Harvard psychologist who died in 1998, 85% of what motivates most healthy people, apart from basic needs like food, shelter and sex, comes down to a desire for three things. These are: achievement (the desire to do things better, faster, more efficiently), power (the desire to influence people and have an impact) and affiliation (the desire to build and maintain relationships).

Although all of us are motivated by all three, studies by McClelland and his disciples over many decades have demonstrated that for 70% of us, one of the three will be dominant.

Around 20% of people are equally motivated by two of the three and just 10% crave achievement, power and affiliation in equal measure.

So what? According to Chris Dyson, a director at Hay Management Consultants, which offers a simple test, based on McClelland's work, to determine a person's main motivators, understanding your type can help make work and personal life more rewarding, and avoid burn-out.

Dyson says: 'If you don't satisfy your basic motive, that's when you get stressed out. Whereas fulfilling your basic motives has the same impact as taking drugs - it releases chemicals that make you feel good.'

Dyson says that motivation is the clue to understanding why some people, such as successful entrepreneurs, or indeed investment bankers, manage to work 70 to 80 hours a week for many years without getting burned out.

How does knowing your type help you at work? Dyson cites a classic pattern of those who excel at their job and then get promoted to team leader or to a management position and hate it. People who are very good at something, such as star traders, are often achievement-oriented types. They are motivated by doing things better, faster, more effectively. Achievement types seek job-related feedback to help them improve their performance, but are less concerned about what people think of them (affiliation) or the wider implications of the job they are doing (power).

Typical behaviours include setting high, but achievable goals and measuring their performance - often through their pay packets. Natural leaders, meanwhile, are often those whose prime motivation is power.

Although the word can carry negative connotations, says Dyson, the power motivation can be very positive, a desire to influence people and have an impact on the world around you. 'Power-motivated people can have high degrees of emotional intelligence,' he says.

The good news is that although it is very difficult to change your prime motivator, it is possible to learn the behaviours of people with a different motivator - and to adapt the way that you work or play to continue to reflect your basic type.

Dyson reckons that the reason many very successful people also excel at something in their private lives, such as sport, music or managing an investment portfolio, is that they are satisfying their achievement motivation at a time when their career calls for more of the behaviours of an influencer. When you can't measure your job performance as clearly as in your early career because a substantial part of it is about managing or influencing other people, it's all the more important to measure the improvement in your golf handicap.

Watching what people do in retirement is also instructive. 'I know one former chief executive who took up watercolour painting. He's so good at it now that he sells his pictures and derives 50% of his income from them. It wasn't enough for him just to do it, he had to be measurably good at it,' Dyson says.

The achievement motivation also crops up in Herzberg's Hygiene-Motivation theory, which Moran at Penna City uses to help people understand their motivators at work.

The hygiene part refers to elements that need to be present as basics, such as the nature of the organisation you work for, reasonable working conditions and pay and benefits.

These do not positively motivate people, but do cause dissatisfaction if they are not right. Motivators, meanwhile, are broadly categorised as achievement, recognition and responsibility.

'I add two things when talking to clients - the social inter-action that makes work fun and working somewhere where you are being invested in,' says Moran. It's easy for employers to underestimate the importance of the social side, he believes. 'That's why people move jobs as a team, to recreate the social network. The hardest time in a job is the first 100 days when people don't have a social network.'