Money isn’t everything, especially when it comes to motivating employees—but it’s also not irrelevant.

Chip Conley’s Joie de Vivre hotel chain in the San Francisco Bay area struggled after 9/11. In an interview on FastCompany’s Web site (click here), Conley talks about turning to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid to understand how to connect to the higher needs of employees, customers, and investors. He developed an employee pyramid with three basic themes: “survival at the base, succeed at the middle, and transformation at the top. Applying that to employees, it’s money, recognition, and meaning.”

Conley and his leaders worked on building a culture of recognition and meaning:

• Senior leaders ended their meetings on a positive note.
• They created an environment of recognition throughout the organization.
• They made a rule that the person giving recognition needs to be from a different department than the person being recognized.
• They added questions to the twice-annual work climate surveys measuring performance on the top-of-the-pyramid attributes.
• They held offsite retreats with line level employees to promote recognition and instill meaning.
• They measured relationships to help evaluate manager effectiveness.

Joie de Vivre’s focus on the employee pyramid seems to have produced results: It was named one of the top ten “Best Places to Work in the Bay Area for the fifth year in 2010.

One note of caution: Recognition and meaning cannot replace fair pay. Wages in this country have been stagnant for so long, and jobs are so hard to come by these days, that senior leaders seem to give little thought to increasing wages in any meaningful way. If the productivity gains of the last two decades that have spawned record executive pay had also led to commensurate increases in worker pay, one could argue that the American economy would be significantly stronger because millions of hardworking Americans would have more disposable income on hand.

Recognition and meaning are essential to employee satisfaction and engagement, but they are an airy substitute for fair pay.

To read more about employee engagement, click on these articles:

• Engaging Employees to Improve Performance
• What Drives You?
• Workforce Well-Being
• Paying Disengaged Employees\
• Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement
• Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline

(7 votes, average: 4.14 out of 5)

 Loading ...