Motivation and Commitment. Every employer's dream is to have highly motivated and committed employees. Policing is no different. We want to attract the cream of the crop; the high achievers. There is so much work to do out on the streets with calls and investigations and such a shortage of personnel that we desperately need motivated officers. In fact, having unmotivated officers not only de-motivates everyone else, it can also be a liability issue within our organizations.
So what exactly motivates people? What makes someone get up for work and be ready to give 110% and what makes someone mosey in ten minutes late? Life Role Development Group provided some interesting information at a recent Management Course I attended at the Saskatchewan Police College.
Employees come to our organization with built in or intrinsic motivation. This has been developed within themselves throughout their childhood and adolescence. Intrinsic motivation according to Wikipedia occurs when there are noticeable internal rewards for the things we do and how we behave. These include:
- Reaching goals set for yourself and the sense of achievement that accompanies that.
- The amount of effort you put into something relates directly to your success and that everything is not all based on luck.
- Being interested in and mastering a craft or some activity.
So as a young person, if you have set goals and reached them, got rewards for when you made an effort and have been able to master some type of activity, you should be strong in intrinsic motivation.
For Police Services, we should be looking for intrinsically motivated people when we are recruiting and hiring. We should test for it and base questions on goal setting, past achievements and efforts. Once we have hired them there are also things an organization can do as extrinsic motivators as well. The problem with extrinsic motivators is that certain motivators motivate a certain type of person whereas another person would find that it was not a motivator at all.
An example of an extrinsic motivator is the reward system. Reward systems however, often do not improve performance and may even reduce performance in some. It can also have the dangerous side-effect of reducing intrinsic motivation as well. In almost all cases you will always have some internal strife. "How come she/he got a reward and I didn't?"
So what motivates people?
- People want to learn, develop and grow. This is what we have been doing all of our lives.
- People want to do meaningful work.
- They want to achieve, building on intrinsic motivation of setting goals and achieving them.
- They want to be recognized when they do good work. Not from a rewards program perspective, but from a personal perspective, supervisor to employee.
- Advancing in an organization and taking responsibility is also a motivator. It empowers people.
- Salary can be a motivator OR a de-motivator. If it is too little it is a de-motivator, if it is high it is a motivator.
What are some De-Motivators?
- Poor supervision.
- Lack of job security.
- Poor employee relations.
- Poor policies and procedures.
- Lack of Communication.
To give you an example, few people get out of bed earlier than usual to go to work because an organization developed good policy! However, when organizations release poor policy that employees perceive to be unfair or unhelpful, motivation will likely go down.
It all comes down to job satisfaction, both from a work and social perspective. But do we ever sit down with our employees and ask them how things are going? In Saskatoon supervisors are obligated to sit down with our employees and assess them with a performance evaluation. This annual event does not assist in keeping members motivated and addressing issues that de-motivate them in a timely manner.
Keeping officers motivated is a full time job. But motivation is directly connected to commitment. Commitment is very important in the policing world. Dennis Kinlaw developed "Kinlaw's Pillars of Commitment", that set out what an officer needs in the workplace to have the ability to be committed to the job and the organization.
- CLARITY about goals, aims, values and vision helps employees connect their work to a bigger picture
- COMPETENCE ensures that employees can do what's asked of them (but not so easily that they're bored stiff!)
- INFLUENCE refers to employee's abilities to contribute to the direction of the organization and their own roles
- APPRECIATION of employees includes caring for them as human beings and taking account of their effort and context (e.g., looking after their equipment needs)
Next time you, as a supervisor, are meeting with your officers ask them what their weakest pillar is? Do they have enough training to do the job and feel competent? Are they clear about what it is they are to be doing in their assignment? If they have ideas on how to improve the organization are they listened to and their thoughts taken into consideration? Are they being appreciated for the hard work they do? It is the supervisor's job to be on top of this. Kinlaw guarantees that if you are strong in all four pillars you have an environment that employees can commit to. If one of the four is missing or weak, commitment levels shatter.
So what can we do as police organizations?
- Discover what is de-motivating your employees and eliminate them.
- Eliminate unclear or conflicting expectations
- Recognize that de-motivation is as much an organizational issue as it is an individual one.
- Break with tradition and encourage new ideas and initiatives from employees of all ranks.
- Keep employees productively busy so they can leave work feeling they accomplished something worthwhile.
- Encourage members to have fun and offer a variety of work assignments and flexible shifts to accommodate this.
- Use performance evaluations to encourage, facilitate and guide, not control, punish or find fault.
- Involve employees in goal setting. It provides ownership for those goals.
- Recognize good work.
- Communicate properly and often.
- When making change tell why. What people don't understand they perceive as a threat.
