Send to KindleJennifer was a good worker and the customers liked her. She consistently received favorable customer comments and many of the regulars asked for her by name. The store manager always gave Jennifer high marks on her appraisals and felt she had a great future with the company. When Jennifer announced that she was leaving, it was a great surprise for both her department and the store manager. Jennifer left the store because she had found a job that paid more.
But wait, aren’t there studies in management academia that show people are not motivated by more money. Yes there are! What companies must realize though (understanding that local managers of chain businesses usually have little or no control over salaries) is that compensation sufficient to meet an employee’s basic physiological needs is necessary before they will be motivated to reach a higher level of need. In Jennifer’s case, and she is representative of many employees euphemistically called “associates”, she was not paid a sufficient salary to meet what she felt were the basic needs for herself and her family.
At this point we need to define what the survival need is. In his Hierarchy of Needs, Abraham Maslow defined this level of need as including such things as air, water, sleep, food, and shelter. These needs have become more complex through the years. Our ancestors saw survival needs as perhaps a cave to live in and sufficient quantity of food on the hoof.
Needs, or perhaps the definition of needs, changes over time. Today, we’ve certainly progressed beyond that; we want a little more than a cave and we usually get our food in the store, not by chasing it around the Serengeti. Certainly, what some people see as a need today might be viewed as an extravagance by others. One of the many factors involved in the recent economic downturn is people deciding that they need much more than they can reasonably expect to pay. I’m certainly not suggesting leaders are responsible for subsidizing a society that is heavily leveraged in the quest to meet “needs” for big houses and more toys. That’s definitely an unwinnable endeavor.
Rather, consider the worker whose paycheck is not sufficient to pay the bills and put food on the table. That worker is going to seek out other opportunities to increase compensation enough to meet those real survival needs. They may take a second job, affecting their concentration on the first job, or they might even resort to illegal activities. Whatever they do, in all cases, they will not be able to realize any motivation to move to higher levels of need.
Are you losing good people because they feel the company is not meeting their survival needs?
In the next post, I’ll take a look at the next level of physiological need; safety.
Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.
