by Amy Clinton
At ACCION Chicago we spend a lot of time talking numbers with our clients. As a lender, it makes sense that our primary conversations with clients center on how to make their businesses work financially. However, the qualitative aspects of owning and running a small business may be some of the most dynamic and challenging aspects of the job.
Once you’ve secured financing for your business, there are still a lot of non-financial details to attend to. At first, many small businesses are run only by the owner or the owner’s friends and family. As businesses grow, small business owners must inevitably hire employees. Hiring and retaining the right people to keep your business stable and growing can be essential to the organization’s success. Once you’ve hired employees, it’s important to motivate them to work their hardest and smartest. This will make them both more satisfied with their jobs and will create more value for your business. If you have the right people, how do you motivate them to perform their best at work?
Money is not as important as you think. The implications of money management can be much greater for a small business than for a larger, more stable company. We’ve got good news for you small business owners: you don’t have to go broke to motivate and maintain your employees. According to a study done at Westminster College in Utah, “While 65% of managers think money is the most successful motivation technique, only 18% of employees agree. Instead, they cited boosting morale and recognition as higher on the scale.”
So what is important to motivating employees? The author of Drive, Dan Pink, said it best in his TED Talk. He has concluded that there are three primary factors that drive people to perform in the workplace.
- Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives
- Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters
- Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
If, in addition to paying people adequately and fairly, you can work these three components into the jobs of those you employ, Dan Pink says your employees will be more motivated and your business more successful. Many companies (including Google), use a method called Twenty Percent Time. Engineers can spend twenty percent of their time working on whatever they want as long as it isn’t part of their job. The result? In a single year, fifty percent of Google’s new products were invented on twenty percent time.
We realize most of you aren’t software engineers, and the businesses you run in Chicago are more different than similar to those in Silicon Valley. However, you can take these concepts and adapt them to make your businesses more productive and your employees more content. An accountant might allow her employees to create their own hours as long as they finish their work on time (called a ROWE: Results Only Work Environment). A restaurant owner might facilitate an all staff meeting once a week so that cooks, waiters, and bus boys all collaborate together to create and test new dishes. At ACCION we know that getting a loan is only one part of building a strong business, and encourage small business owners to think outside the box in motivating employees to be productive and fulfilled at work.
Sources and articles for further reading:
Socialcast Blog: Motivating Employees in the Workplace – It’s Not Just About the Money
Inc. Magazine: 9 Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money
TED Talk: Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation
James Bird Guess: How to Motivate Your Employees Without Money
