What Motivates Us to Excel? A Personalized Look at Employee Engagement

Photo National Highway Traffic Safety Administration A file photo of a 911 call center.   Knowing and studying engagement can yield some great techniques to encourage engagement with your staff but nothing beats firsthand knowledge of what motivates your staff. When we started asking this of the crews, we had some of the same questions that others may have. What would make anyone in their right mind run into, rather than away from, a stressful and possibly dangerous situation day after day to altruistically care for others? Some of the answers are what you would expect and others were somewhat of a surprise. Many of the usual answers of why our staff was motivated to come to work was the great partner that they had, the good equipment they had to use, the desire to be part of something bigger than themselves and do something for others. Some of them are engaged to come to work simply to collect a paycheck and pay their bills. Many of them were engaged by not knowing what was going to happen next in their course of work, appreciating the excitement of the unknown, as well as the varied work environment. We started with asking our crews face to face during some mandatory training to anonymously write down on a sheet of paper what engages them. There was some discussion with the crews on what do we mean by engagement? Definition #1, which was not especially helpful, stated that engagement was the “act of engaging or being engaged.” A search for synonyms yielded fur...
Source: JEMS Administration and Leadership - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Exclusive Articles Communications & Dispatch Administration and Leadership Source Type: news