Employment

Satisfiers and Motivators

It’s logical to suppose that things like good labour relations, good working conditions, good wages and benefits, and job security motivate workers. But in “Work and the Nature of Man”, Frederick Herzberg argued that such conditions don’t motivate workers. They are merely “satisfiers” or, more importantly, “dissatisfiers”. “Motivators”, on the contrary, include things such as having a challenging and interesting job, recognition and responsibility, promotion, and so on.

However, even with the development of IT technologies, there are and always will be plenty of boring, mindless, repetitive and mechanical jobs in all sectors of the economy, and lots of unskilled people who have to do them.

So how do managers motivate people in such jobs? One solution is to give them some responsibilities, not as individuals but as part of a team. For example, some supermarkets combine office staff, the people who fill the shelves, and the people who work on the checkout tills into a team and let them decide what product lines to stock, how to display them, and so on. Other employers ensure that people in repetitive jobs change them every couple of hours, as doing 4 different repetitive jobs a day is better than doing only 1. Many people now talk about the importance of a company’s shared values or corporate culture, with which all the staff can identify: for example, being the best hotel or restaurant chain, or airline, or making the best, the safest, the most user-friendly, the most ecological and the most reliable products in a particular field. Such values are more likely to motivate workers than financial targets, which ultimately only concern a few people. Unfortunately, there is just a limited number of such goals to go round, and by definition, not all the competing companies in an industry can seriously claim to be the best.

Notes:

checkout till – касса (в магазине)

user-friendly – удобный для пользователя