Motivation In An Engineering Project Environment

Motivation In An Engineering Project Environment. The engineering project delivery environment is very stressful, with many deadlines and complex solutions that must be overcome daily. It’s an industry where large corporate companies employ thousands of people on a specific project and the project employees migrate from one company to the next to follow the projects. This phenomenon created a pool of staff available to the industry, that has no real loyalty to the company they work for and focus on optimizing the remuneration they receive while on a project knowing that after the project, they will have to find something else.

Although it works well for the big project houses as they do not need to carry the staff burden when they do not have a project, they often have to execute projects with staff that is not really motivated to do the work, and the efficiency of the delivery suffers.

This article will thus focus on getting the most out of the people who work for you in the engineering project environment by motivating them correctly.

Many employers think that money motivates personnel, and you don’t have to do anything else if you pay them enough. Although money is important, and employees need to be able to support their families and meet their basic needs every month, studies actually show that it’s not such a big motivator.

It all starts with the recruitment process; once candidates have been identified and invited for interviews, it’s as important for the employer to sell their business, culture and objectives to the potential candidate as it’s for the candidate to sell him or herself to the employer. Once the employee gets excited about the business and understands his or her role in making this great organization better, you will have a motivated employee to start with.

Although qualifications and previous performance play a role in the selection process, that won’t get you anywhere if the employee is not motivated to succeed. Thus, attitude should play a major role in the selection process of the correct candidate.

Once your employee starts working for you, it’s important that they feel welcome and understand how they will add value to your organization and how important their role is to the business. The biggest mistake any employer can make is making the new employee feel insignificant in the organization. Even if it’s a graduate with no experience, they should understand that they are the next generation of engineers or project managers in this organization and can contribute to the success of the business.

As an employer, you could have tactics of employing the top academic students and ensuring you get them early by offering them bursaries and other incentives. Still, you won’t get real value from your recruits if you don’t understand how to motivate them. In many cases, you will find that personnel who were not necessarily top of their class become superstars in the industry. This happens when employers motivate employees correctly and appoint people with the right attitudes.

Although employees like structure within an organization, generalizing their progress and performance with the industry norm or their peers is the first way to kill enthusiasm and motivation. Big companies like to place employees into boxes, for example, you have to work as a Junior Engineer for 3 years, then you can become an Engineer. Or you can never perform better than another employee in the ranks even if you do your work much better and get to grips with the problems quicker than somebody else. Industry norms exist for the normal, but if you want to grow a motivated, performance-based group of employees, you should remove the shackles and allow them to move as quickly as possible.

Employees will always make mistakes; some will make more than others, but no one generally plans to do bad work or make mistakes. They should understand that making mistakes and learning from them is okay. As a motivating employer, you should be there to catch them when they fall but allow them to fall. Finger-pointing should not exist in your organization, and the only way for any employee to grow and perform is to take risks and learn from the outcomes of these risks.

Studies show ownership is one of the biggest motivators in an Engineering Project Environment for any individual or industry. When we feel part of something, we motivate ourselves from within. Thus, employees need to feel a sense of ownership in their work and know that it’s significant to the organization. As an employer or senior manager, you should be careful not to do all the new employee’s work for them or give them portions so insignificant that they do not feel ownership. Engineers are very bad delegators and want to do everything themselves; this often leads to junior engineers not getting enough exposure and demotivates them. Share schemes work wonders in giving staff purpose and motivating them; this can be introduced early in an employee’s career and keep them motivated for the rest of their career.

As a young engineer and recruit, writing a report is the best way to impress your seniors. There’s much more to your job than writing reports, but it’s a good way for the senior manager or engineer to judge your capability, thought patterns and logic. As a senior engineer reviewing the document, you must motivate your junior engineer. This does not mean that you take a red pen, give thousands of comments on the report, and tell the employee how bad the report was and how much better you can write it. Even worse than these comments is when the senior engineer decides to rewrite the whole report as he can do it better himself. This is a sign of weakness for the senior engineer. It will take some time before the Junior Engineer writes a perfect report; how soon that happens is up to the senior engineer and how he handles himself during the review and feedback process.

A major component of motivation starts with trust. If the employee doing the work knows that the employer trusts and depends on him or her, the employee is motivated to deliver this document to ensure the trust is kept in tack. If, however, the senior engineer does not trust that the junior can do the work and communicates this to anybody in the mood to listen to his whining, the employee probably won’t deliver the document following the senior’s requirements, and everybody will be unhappy and demotivated.

As with endurance athletes who usually run a lot more kilometres even after their body feels like they cannot go on anymore, employees can do much more than they think. Again, it is up to the employer or senior engineer to motivate and cheer the employee over the line. People achieve what other people believe they can achieve. So, if you believe in your employees and their abilities to perform the tasks, even if it might be a reach for them, they will be motivated to show you they can reach them. Once they reach the task, they will get a boost in self-confidence and reach ever-higher levels.

As with anything in life, there is no substitute for positivity. If employees grow up in a positive, motivated and performing environment, they will quickly adopt the company culture and make performance second nature.

Positive thinking is closely related to motivation, and a positive environment is critical to a company’s success. Negative personnel spread negativity like a virus and should be neutralized as soon as possible. If the employer cannot change a negative person’s attitude, they should find something else to waste their negativity on and move on to a different organization.

Working in a motivated team helps everybody be motivated towards a common goal. However, certain employees, especially in larger organizations, perform well on their own but cannot work in teams and think they would perform better by outperforming their peers to get to the top. This behaviour is as bad as negativity and should be eliminated from the group.

Once a group of employees is motivated to perform their tasks and reach their goals, the employer must understand that motivation is a continuous process and that it should be constantly maintained.

A good way of maintaining motivation in the organization is to constantly communicate progress and feedback to the group and show them the results of their performance. Having a transparent process that shows employees how the company is improving with their inputs and how effort relates to profit works very well.

The final and probably the most important aspect of motivation is understanding that it flows from the top. The whole company’s culture is derived from the culture and values of the top management instil. You often get smaller businesses that have somebody at the top that only cares about his back pocket, they don’t see the bigger picture and don’t like spreading the wealth. Although they might make enough money to keep the top dog happy, it will never grow into anything more and the staff will have no loyalty or motivation.