Running a Small Business

Lesson 4: Subcontractors and employees

Employee motivation and performance

Here you are a small business owner. You're typically working long hours for less money than you could make as an employee and you have lots of problems, sorry, challenges to work through. Why are you doing it - what motivates you? Keep that answer in mind because the same thing will motivate your employees once you're building your team and looking for good performance.

Good performance and motivation are mutually re-inforcing. If you do well, you are motivated to do more. If you're motivated, you're more likely to do well. It just takes a small role for you as employer to keep that cycle going.

If you've hired well by analyzing the characteristics needed for the job and hiring employees who have the skills they will require and if you've created attractive positions within the company for them, new employees will usually be strongly motivated to do well. You've given them a great job, they're going to get raises if they do well and if the company is successful, they'll share in that success - all that is motivating.

And they will do well because you've hired people who gave you concrete evidence that they could do what you needed done and because they have excellent reputations - you checked their references. So the one thing they need from you periodically is a bit of confirmation that they are in fact doing well. They need this right from the beginning, right after they come in, strongly motivated and start work. They'll make mistakes but they'll do some things well - you need to notice those things and confirm that they are doing well - that they are the great employee you thought you hired when you offered them the job.

You only have one chance to do that and you have to do it consistently for each employee. Miss one and you may get the morale and performance destroying nay-sayer on staff who brings everyone down. If you bring each employee into the team in this way, you can build a great team which then starts re-inforcing each employee's motivation themselves. And don't worry about the mistakes - the employees will know they made them and the team will work to correct them.

Getting that kind of team going is detailed work. You have to ensure that you hire well. You have to create great jobs. You have to re-inforce each new employee's motivation right from the beginning and you have to let the team correct their own mistakes. All of this, all the time, consistently. But if you do that, you'll have a team which will make it really worthwhile to have employees.

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