Welcome to the second edition of our newsletter!

In our second edition you will find these useful articles:

* How we hope to add value through this newsletter
* An overview of our Team building services
* A preview of our second Great Leader article
* The second of our Best Practice topics – absenteeism control
* Notes from our current thinking

1. Adding value through the newsletter

To be concise, we want to help, to be of value. Our intention is for this newsletter to convey the flavour of both how and what we can do to help your organization.

Employee motivation is our business. We will help you get the best from your people by training and supporting your people managers, at every level, in the concepts, techniques and tools of motivation management.

What are people like in your organization?

All of us know what it feels like to go to work grudgingly and to do just enough work while there! Take a look around you; classify people into the passionate, the just enoughers and the downright negative.

What would happen if some of those “just enoughers” became passionate about their work?

What is it that makes people behave in those ways? Are people born passionate, negative or just so? What effect does their environment and experiences have on their behaviour?

This is the nature vs. nurture debate familiar to educationalists.

In the coming months we will explore these and other issues.

If you have questions or topics you would like included in the newsletter, anonymously if you wish, then please email us here.

We want to help you get the best from your people.

Otherwise for a completely confidential service please use our Help page.

2. Our Team Building services

We have expanded the website content to fully explain our Team Building services.

Teams present a more complex problem than the motivation of individuals.

Most of us work in Teams of some sort, it’s our natural habitat. Primitive man’s hunter-gatherer culture led to the specialisation of labour. A successful team or tribe ate well and thrived, its success creating the opportunity to attract new team members.

Our Team Building service creates the understanding of team roles and behaviour. We ensure all the functional roles in the Team are understood. The motivators are explored and Team leaders trained in their use.

Many of us know of Teams that are great to work in but are impossible to work with! We need strong Teams that are happy to loan resources to other Teams and fit in with the organisation’s objectives.

A classic remedy for this is to weaken the attachment to the home team. That way Team members are less attached to the Team or to anything else for that matter! We don’t think that is satisfactory!

We provide training in management techniques to foster the right behaviour, based on the principles of Likert’s Linking-pin theory.

Do you have opportunities to improve the way your Teams perform?

If you need answers to questions about the motivation of Teams email us here.

3. The Great Leader articles

Our second Great Leader article will be published soon.

We have researched a number of potential Great Leaders but found some of them to be either not so Great or not really a Leader!

Our subject this month is well known to all, but our research has revealed behaviour which is strikingly at odds with the commonly held public view.

This person revolutionised the working methods of a huge bureaucracy and delivered a massive change programme which has underpinned the culture to the present day.

Do check back to our website in a week or so to see the article!

Do you have any ideas for other Great Leaders? In fact we could give you the opportunity to write about the deeds of the hero or heroine that inspired you!

Please e-mail us your suggestions or writings here .

4. The Best Practice forum - Absenteeism

The subject this month is the control of absenteeism. It is a hot topic right now. Each week brings a new survey which shows different results from the previous one.

Surveys show, on average, that absenteeism in the public sector is a few days a year worse than the private sector where absence is variously reported as between eight and twelve days a year.

There are as many schemes to reduce absence as there are surveys to measure it.

This EU research into absence which makes interesting reading. This is copyright of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.

To us illegitimate absence is a manifestation of poor motivation management practice.

Interestingly some of the absence control schemes destroy motivation. When coupled with strongly positive motivators this may not affect performance too much but it does show the ease with which “common sense” solutions can actually make things worse.

We recommend return to work interviews by the immediate superior and the generation of a document for review. This is the basis for Health & Safety and absence reviews.

Periodic reviews of absence days identify people who are different from the norm. There are many ways of categorising the absence data; some can be difficult to meaningfully communicate to the person.

The Bradford Factor is a favoured index, the product of days absent and distinct occasions of absence.

We find this data is more usefully presented as a scatter graph of total day’s absence versus occasions (independent variable). This clearly shows who deviates from the norm and is easier to discuss with individuals.

Some will be seriously ill and have a few occasions but many days. Some will be frequently mildly ill and have many occasions and many days. The root causes need to be understood and appropriate action taken in each case.

We hope you find that useful and do let us know how you get on. Meanwhile please use our Help facility to explore this and other opportunities.

5. Notes from our current thinking

Let us pose this question to you, particularly those with children, about school exams, GCSEs and so on. Did your children work hard for the exams? Were they worried about poor results and their dreams being shattered?

Have you noticed that whenever exam results are announced the media jump onto the notion that the exams have been devalued and really aren’t worth much at all? What impact does that have on the kids who sat the exam: positive or downright negative? What terrible timing! Shouldn’t we celebrate the kids’ success and discuss the value of the exams at another time?

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How many of you have received “phishes”? These are email scams designed to get you to put your ID and password into a dummy site. These emails look the real thing. Be careful and don’t be fooled!

Have you ever wondered why they do it? Presumably a few people make a living from these scams; they rob your bank accounts or use your credit cards. But so many, hackers, do it to beat the system: to show that they can break the rules, not get caught and thumb a nose at authority.

Of course some of the people working in your organization could have the same outlook!

What behaviour can they get away with before being noticed? That isn’t phishing or hacking, it’s what is politely called working without enthusiasm.

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What do you need to do to get more from your people?

6. Our next Newsletter

We hope you enjoyed this Newsletter. Please forward it to anyone you feel would enjoy it. Please look at the information on our website for more details and articles.

The next Newsletter will be in December 2005.

7. We respect your privacy

Although we believe you wish to receive communications from us we accept that this newsletter may be something you do not wish to receive again.

Please e-mail to here from the email address you wish to unsubscribe.

Thank you.

© 2005 Motivation Matters Limited