Regardless of their work positions, all your employees have specific needs and expectations towards you as their employer. Of course, depending on the functions played in the school, those needs can differ slightly. Are you aware of them? In this connection, have you thought what factors motivate your employees?

Managing employees is one of the greatest challenges faced by every employer. Motivating them constantly  for achievement of better results is one of the basic tasks of a manager. How this should be done in a language school? What positions should be favoured? What to start with?

A few words of theory

Nobody likes the theory, but one should know it to be able to implement interesting and effective solutions.

I would like you return in your memory to the times when you were somebody’s employee yourself. What was important for you back then? And what made you feel good or bad in a given organisation? Salary, atmosphere, relations with the superior, personal development or rather lack thereof? And what motivates you now for further work? Appreciation, money, responsibility?

The aforementioned factors can be divided into 2 groups: workplace hygiene factors and motivators.

The following can be listed as workplace hygiene factors:

  • fair remuneration,
  • positive relations with the superior,
  • good work conditions guaranteeing safety,
  • nice atmosphere.

Those factors should be satisfied simply to make anyone willing to work for you and to help you to be able to build a stable team. If any of the above conditions is not met, your employees will be dissatisfied with work and rather sooner than later will start looking elsewhere for the place where they belong. At the same time, meeting only those conditions on their own will not make your employees motivated for work and willing to go an extra mile. The aforementioned motivators are needed to achieve this.

Only such factors as:

  • professional achievement and successes,
  • competence development, promotions,
  • scope of responsibilities,
  • recognition from the team and superior,
  • content of the performed work

will increase work satisfaction of your employees.

 

Which motivators for secretariat employees and which ones for teachers?

Owing to character of work and discharged duties, you will need completely different things to motivate a secretariat employee and a teacher.

Sample motivators for secretariat:
  1. expansion of the scope of responsibilities e.g. with marketing activities, if a given person feels confident to perform them,
  2. competence development via internal and external trainings in the field of sales, customer service, social media, e-mail marketing,
  3. rewarding good sales results,
  4. commendation for commitment at employees’ meeting.
Sample motivators for teachers:
  1. educational successes of students,
  2. competence development via internal and external trainings in the field of methodology, working with difficult students, technologies,
  3. rewarding them for achieved results and involvement in the life of the school,
  4. commendation at the methodological meeting for the used methods and successes of their students,
  5. performance of a methodological training for the teachers’ team,
  6. promotion to the position of the school methodologist.

 

Power of motivation

When presenting motivators to an employee or an employee group, transparent rules matter most. An employee must understand precisely what goal they have to achieve to channel their motivation in the right direction.

Another very important thing is comprised by subjectively perceived likelihood of achieving the assumed goal. If the bar is set too high, and – consequently – the goal is unattainable from the very start, employee’s motivation will not increase at all.

Moreover, you cannot count on motivation growth if the reward is not valuable enough or if – because of high competition and unequal opportunities – an employee will subjectively think they have not a slightest chance to achieve the goal. Certainly, perception of those values is highly subjective but the power of motivation will be equally subjective.

Example: Imagine that you are organising a teachers’ meeting, where you will announce a “competition”. The teacher whose students achieve the highest grades at examination courses, provided the score is over 90%, will receive 3 one-day external trainings and a week of extra holidays.

 

And now let us break the competition into its constituent elements:

  1. The value of the reward is high, but we have a few teachers who never take days off, so for them this part of the reward is of low value.
  2. Likelihood of achieving the goal – owing to very high competencies, one of the teachers was given the most difficult groups. For her/him the likelihood of achieving the goal is subjectively low.
  3. The possibility to receive the reward – only 1/2 of the teachers run groups with examination courses, so subjective possibility to win the reward for half of the teachers is null.

On the basis of the presented example, one can easily see that the same motivating actions will not work for all employees, even in the same work positions. Such actions must be diversified according to specific character of work of a given person and their needs.

Although a given idea’s assumptions can be great, the best way to verify it will be by putting yourself in a given employee’s shoes and checking whether a given motivating action will work for their work position.

 

Related post:

Part 1. of the LangLion Management Series:
Employer branding – or how to build a powerful employer brand?

Part 2. of the LangLion Management Series:
Should employees determine the level of their salaries? [CASE STUDY]