Human Assets

Ensuring your people are motivated to stay

Of course you want all of your employees to stay with you - especially those with the most talent and potential.  To ensure that they do stay, it is important that they are offered clear development and promotion opportunities, a balanced workload, and competitive pay and benefits.  The relationships between people in the organisation should also be monitored, as these can have an effect on employee retention.  Previous research in the area has found that conflict between colleagues and/or supervisors can cause employees to leave their organisation, especially when they feel helpless and are unable to take action to resolve the conflict (e.g. by changing roles or managers).  Building on these findings, psychologists from Maastricht University in the Netherlands set out to investigate what specific types of work characteristics, such as amount and content of work had an impact on three outcomes: employees' motivation, exhaustion levels and intention to leave an organisation.  The relationship between these three outcomes and several different work characteristics were examined, in both bankers and teachers. The characteristics and outcomes were:

Work characteristics

-  Task characteristics: content of work carried out by employees on a daily basis
-  Workload: amount of work that employees are expected to complete
-  Social support: provision of emotional and practical assistance given as and when required by managers, or team members
-  Career expectations: employee's perception of having career needs met

Psychological outcomes

-  Intrinsic work motivation: motivation to keep performing well is experienced when employees have high autonomy, receive feedback and have a important/identifiable piece of work to carry out.
-  Emotional exhaustion: particularly influenced by workload, time pressure, lack of social support and role stress
-  Turnover intention: conditions of employment such as salary and career opportunities are key causes of turnover intention

The results of the research showed that variations in all of the above work characteristics had an effect on motivation, exhaustion levels and level of turnover.  Furthermore, this effect was true over time.  Key findings were as follows:

- Unmet career expectations led to incresed intention to leave the organisation
- Employees given 'challenging work' tended to have high levels of intrinsic employee motivation both immediately and in the longer term.
- Excessive workloads can lead to an increase in emotional exhaustion

How can Human Assets help?
Practically, the results provide a basis for interventions aimed at maintaining employee commitment and motivation.  We can assist you by examining the array of work characteristics which influence motivation, emotional exhaustion and turnover in your organisation, using a combination of focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires.  We can present our findings, and discuss changes that could be implemented, to ensure that you are doing everything to maintain commitment and motivation.   Interventions may include:

-  Re-designing tasks to influence the intrinsic work motivation of employees in both the short and long term. 
-  Reducing levels of workload to prevent emotional exhaustion.
-  Examining career expectations of employees (e.g. career development programmes, education programmes), facilitating retention of valuable employees.