Chapter 3: Employee Motivation and Engagement

In many organizations, significant components of productivity can be overlooked or overshadowed by just simply looking at the total output per employee or per department. Two of these overlooked components are employee engagement and motivation. This begs the question of what the difference is between the two. Also, are they both prevalent in the workplace at the same time? We’ll take a further look into both of these components in this chapter but first, let’s discuss them individually to determine how they are different from each other.

Key Takeaways

• Be able to identify the key distinguishing factors between employee engagement and employee motivation.
• Motivation and engagement are important factors required for an organization to successfully reach workplace goals, and for employees to reach their own personal goals.
• When employees see management heavily involved in the training and development, it shows them that their bosses want to better the organization, and the workers. This contributes to improving the performance, by increasing their motivation and engagement.
• The three key methods of increasing employee motivation are improve communication, value individual contributions and ensure the workplace is a positive environment.
• The two-factor theory differentiates between factors that make lead people to feel dissatisfied on the job (hygiene factors) and factors that truly motivate employees (motivators).
• Maslow’s hierarchy describes five categories of basic human needs: physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, and self-actualization needs. These needs are sequentially ranked. As a lower-level need is satisfied, it no longer serves as a motivator.

Authors: Amarjot Uppal, Gab Sandhu, Gurneet Kaler