[2-minute insight]

A person’s happiness and success at work is partly determined by how well their core motivators are being met. As we know, times have changed considerably since the pandemic. Let’s look at how motivation affects performance.

Many people still work from home, opting for remote or hybrid working but both of these still come with challenges and distractions. Not everyone wants to go into the office and not everyone wants to work from home either.

And this can be a problem.

Without question, performance levels will drop when a person’s motivators are not continuously met and satisfied. Where behaviours can change, albeit slowly over time, motivations are much more fluid and can change every few weeks or months.

For example, people who were highly driven by financial reward as an Achievement Motivator, prior to the pandemic, taking into account furlough and redundancy concerns, found themselves becoming more motivated by job security and organisational stability.

Similarly, people with Relationship Motivators, who greatly value a sense of belonging really struggled during lockdowns because they were stuck at home.

In London alone 44% of employees under 35 years old say that a lack of motivation has been hindering their performance at work since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 according to research.

The study of over 1000 British employees, carried out by YouGov, reveals that the performance of younger workers (under 35 years old) is twice as likely to be impacted by a lack of motivation than that of 45-54-year olds (22%), and significantly more likely to be impacted by a lack of motivation than the average for all age groups (28%)

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Motivators are often overlooked in favour of skills, experience and behaviour. This can be detrimental to a person’s, and therefore, company’s performance. Motivation affects performance because fundamentally it’s the fuel to the furnace of success.

Most people are not, by default, passively inclined. We all have inherent needs and desires inside and outside of work. The truth is, because many people aren’t even aware of what their core motivators are, they can be difficult to express, even to themselves! Getting a good grasp of a person’s core motivators using tools like Motivational Maps is the the key to unlocking the complex motivation puzzle.

The three elements to performance:

DIRECTION: Where a person or the company is heading. Not knowing this results in passive, floundering behaviours e.g. ‘going round in circles’. Going against the grain of our motivators will result in failure over success.
SKILLS: This also extends to knowledge, competencies and abilities.
MOTIVATION: The driving force, the why we do what we do.

If motivation underpins performance, what then underpins motivation?
This also carries three elements…

Personality – Who we are.
Self-concept – Beliefs about ourselves, people and the world around us.
Expectations – Our beliefs about future outcomes.

Here is how the founder of Motivational Maps, James Sale, describes these three elements:

Our motivations are critically linked to our internally focused beliefs and our externally focused beliefs. In short, our beliefs, per se, play a staggering role in our motivations or lack thereof. Thus it is that if we want to improve our performance in any area, we need to consider what we believe about self and about the external environment in which we operate. It is no accident that the word ‘confidence’ comes from the Latin root, ‘con’ meaning ‘with’ and ‘fidence’ meaning faith.

So ‘with faith’ or ‘with belief’ underpins all motivation, all performance, and so all achievement. The question we then have is: How as coaches, mentors, consultants, leaders, managers and so on, can we effectively change our beliefs, internally and externally, to create optimum performance?

The irony cannot be lost. To achieve the results we want in the real world, we have to enter the nebulous realm of un-being – belief!

James sale, founder of motivational maps

To summarise, motivation is not just related to performance, it’s a crucial element! The more a person’s motivators are understood and met, the higher their performance levels will be.

Want to know how motivated your candidates and people are? And what you can do to help them perform better?

Using Motivational Maps as part of your hiring and team development processes will reveal all! You can also access your FREE sample of a Motivational Map using the form below.

Samantha Lynne
I help business owners & hiring managers streamline candidate interviews to make right-first-time hires for the long-term.