success file
How to identify employee needs
By Bob Levoy

To put the motivation of your employees into high gear (and keep it there) you must first identify their job-related needs and then make their jobs so satisfying that they will want to do their very best.

Or as Bob Townsend, former CEO of Avis, has said, “Create the kind of environment that pays people to bring their brains to work.”

The challenge, of course, is to discover what turns your employees on.

Reality check: No two people have the same motivational needs or have them in the same order of importance. A single parent with two school-age children, for example, may have very different job-related needs than a person from a two wage-earner household with grown children.

You can learn about needs in several different ways:

1. In the job interview. Ideally, the initial job interview will uncover an applicant’s job-related needs. Use questions such as, “What about your last job did you like most? Least? Why?”

These questions will also help ascertain if you have the right person for the right job in your office.

2. Ask your employees. Consider asking current employees similar questions to identify their job-related needs, but ask them to put them in writing.

Give them time to think about their answers, perhaps even discuss those needs with someone else. Explain also, that if they’d like to do so, you’ll schedule a one-on-one conference to discuss the results. Such questions might include:

• What part of your job do you like best — and why?

• Are there additional things you would like to do?

• What, if anything, frustrates you about your job?

3. Use the Motivation Inventory. In the sidebar you’ll find a Motivation Inventory I have given to seminar groups to help them focus on their employees’ job-related needs. You can use the tool to identify employees’ job-related needs.

4. Conduct a performance review. Performance reviews are a more formal, in-depth way to learn employees’ job-related needs.

The real key to these four methods of finding out what motivates your employees is to talk to them. Without talking and listening, you won’t know.

To the extent you can identify and address the job-related needs of your employees, the more prone they will be to engage in what psychologists call “motivated behavior.”

Bob Levoy is a seminar speaker and writer who focuses on the healthcare industry. His most recent book is 201 Secrets of a High Performance Dental Practice, Elsevier/Mosby (January, 2005). He can be reached at 516-626-1353.