Motivation in the Workplace

David Jamieson's and Julie O'Mara's book, Managing Workforce 2000: Gaining the Diversity Advantage, shows in a practical way how to attract, make use of, and keep employees with a variety of skills and backgrounds. Using examples from over eighty organizations, the authors show what real companies do to capitalize on a contemporary workforce and how companies have to change in order to mesh with the needs and lifestyles of today's workers. Jamieson is president of the Jamieson Consulting Group and codirector of the Master of Science in Organization Development program at Pepperdine University, and Julie O'Mara is president of O'Mara and Associates, a human resource development consulting firm. The authors cover a variety of important topics in their work�Matching People and Jobs, Managing and Rewarding Performance, Supporting Lifestyle Needs, and Taking Action�and for the purposes of this essay, the focus will be on looking at a variety of ways of approaching motivation in the workplace, examining the work of other researchers as well on the topic of motivation.

Different companies approach employee motivation differently, depending on the company culture, mission, and style of the owners and executives. Moss Pharmacy asked their employees to fill out a workforce study questionnaire in order to find out which benefits were the most influential in the employee's choice of employer. Some employees have professional aspirations, and others have other motivators. Comp

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why companies have gone to automated customer service systems when the public longs for the human touch. He believes that shifting even 5 percent of a marketing research budget to what motivates the behavior of those delivery people and telephone answerers would reap large rewards. Little research is done on why employees fail to deliver, why customer service people put people on hold and then disappear, or why telephone operators are rude to customers. Schultz works at Northwestern University, where he is furthering research on the motivations of those internal workers who have customer contact. He does not believe that the bottom line of successful companies depends upon sales, although that is very important. He believes that it depends upon the motivation level and attitude of those common workers who handle the customers after the goods or services have been sold. Schultz believes that answering questions about employee motivation will have large payoffs in satisfied external customers. His writing is interesting and thought-provoking, approaching the company bottom line from a different perspective than is the norm in management. Besides working with attitudes within, some companies plan team-building events in order

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