The leader always strives to improve the efficiency of the business. Motivated by this desire a great variety of trainings and seminars appeared that promise to “charge” staff with motivation in a short time so they will show records of productivity. Is it really the motivation only?
The view that there is a need to constantly work on motivation of employees has already entrenched, making us to forget the other, no less important aspect: the growth of productivity is increasingly influenced by the level of staff’s discipline. Time tracker serves in particular to keep discipline of employees at a high level.
Two approaches to work
It’s no secret that not every job is equally desirable: according to a VCIOM’s study, a third of employees does not like their job and attends it with reluctance. Maybe that is why a time tracker records a huge loss of time for some employees: long tea breaks, reading news feeds, and playing online games. It is impossible to make them like their duties, but it is possible to motivate them to no avail. Zbyněk Dráb, the author of the blog Wisdomination, published a post on this topic. He argues that for any activity there are two main ways: first and wrong is to try to motivate yourself and others; the second is to develop discipline (and, in particular, self-discipline). How often employer tries to motivate staff in an attempt to increase productivity? Indeed, the motivation is to try to bring a mental-emotional state of a person to a certain level to complete a task. In fact, after two days of intensive motivational training/seminar staff continue to perform the same job reluctantly, which eloquently confirmed by results of time tracking software. As stated by Zbyněk Dráb, relying on motivation, we make a huge mistake.
Discipline vs motivation
Discipline as opposed to motivation is distanced from the emotional and sensual components. A disciplined person is able to perform high quality job even if it is unpleasant and uninteresting, but needs to be done. The time tracker shows that disciplined employees demonstrate higher and more stable performance, because their productivity is not linked to mood and emotional state. People waiting for the right mood to accomplish a task are similar to a person who does not start training because he is not in Olympic-ready condition. Waiting for the right mood becomes a particularly insidious form of procrastinating. An employee in such a state will wait for his psycho-emotional tone to become appropriate before performing any task. Such employees often do not exhibit the highest levels of productivity according to statistics of the time tracker. If a manager wants his staff to become truly productive and the amount of non-productive time shown by the time tracker is in the normal range (10-12%), the following should be borne in mind: to promote motivational approach among the staff means to promote infantile attitude, when employees perform only when they are in the mood. The discipline approach requires effort of will to separate feelings from actions to consistently perform tasks that need to be performed and to feel energetic and calm in any mood. Motivation, on contrary, tends to end very quickly, and if employees are constantly motivationally “processed”, the motivational effect of such “processing” will be less and less pronounced. Such motivational approach will yield very poor long-term results. In contrast, the approach of discipline is well suited for consistent long-term results. One must remember that high productivity does not require special psycho-emotional state. This means that employees are able to work effectively even without much emotion, if they are disciplined: consistently active, volitional and persistent, always bring tasks through, determined, and capable of quick and cooperative action. The time tracker nicely contributes to such skills of self-discipline. Controlling your employees using the time tracker CrocoTime will help your company to increase productivity without relying on employees’ degree of motivation, but helping them to become more disciplined.