BOUNDLESS EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION  

About three-fourths of your workforce is much less motivated today than they were earlier. Four out of every five employees of your organisation perform much below their potential and they know it. Half of your employees put in just that much effort into their job as is required to remain in their job. Did you ever expect such a shocking stuff? Is this what you want in your organisation? Perhaps you might be losing your patience. Don't worry; there is a silver-lining. The good news is that 100% of your employees are capable of an endless supply of motivation.

Just name one or two employees of your organisation who stand out because they have more energy, higher output and more passion for their work than everybody else taken together. Chances are that it is you. Have you ever thought of the possible reasons why others do not feel as motivated as you do? Why aren't they coming up to give a bit extra? You never expected anything unreasonable from them like working for extra hours or taking additional responsibilities. You just want a slight change in the attitude; say a smile instead of a frown or a cooperative approach than a disinterested look. Now the question is what is to be done to lift the employees' morale and make them ready to put in that extra bit which may go a long way in making your customers delighted.

Is your company offering benefits like comprehensive health care coverage, retirement plans with benefits like Gratuity and Provident Fund in line with the best retirement plan prevailing in the industry and company sponsored overseas vacations and still getting not such brilliant performance from your employees? If yes, you have discovered the truth that extra benefits or even heavy pay packets cannot motivate people. They might help you retain your workforce, but would never provide employee motivation. These benefits can only attract and retain talent. In most companies, the most valuable employees always walk away with the most valuable pay and perks packages.

HOW TO BUILD A TEAM

 The importance of developing a highly cohesive and effective team can be gauged from some of the strangest methods adopted by organisations across the world for this purpose. In the name of team building, they tried everything like having their employees hang from ropes, play an intensive sport like paintball and participate in sumo-wrestling wearing inflatable sumo suits. Corporations could still be exploring new things and one day might ask their employees to perform strange tasks like swimming with dolphins to inculcate team spirit or even ask them to go for parachuting as a strategy to create a winning team out of a group of quarrelling individuals. Of late, the so-called team building activities have become so absurd and nonsensical to employees as well as employers that I developed a kind of scepticism towards all types of team building exercises. If I get a chance to represent the employees, my suggestion to the employers would be not to force the employees to play silly games like table soccer or musical games like karaoke in the name of team building. Given a chance to speak to the HR Managers, I would definitely ask them to think about the effectiveness of activities like corporate sailing, employee Olympics etc. These activities could be great fun, but expecting that these activities would ultimately boost up the team spirit at the work place would be too much.

 Here comes the most pertinent question; if games and group activities cannot transform a group of employees into a cohesive team, then what else can achieve this? To this, my simple answer is that if you are interested in building a team, you have to do it at the work place without telling your employees that you are actually on it. There are a few reasons why such activities should be kept a secret. 

Firstly, employees generally prefer to work in groups as this is a basic instinct of human beings. The fact is that human beings are naturally geared to work in teams and there is no need of any extraordinary activity to inculcate this behaviour in them.

Secondly, as employees are naturally equipped to work in teams, the primary task before the top management is to integrate teamwork practices into the daily work patterns. It is clearly the responsibility of the leaders to incorporate team work practices and of course not of the employees.

Finally, by announcing that your organisation is planning to build effective teams, most employees would wait for the entire process to be over to get back to their routine activities. In any way making your team building efforts public will not provide any additional motivation to the employees and this is not likely to help you bring in any cohesion all of a sudden.

 Organisational leaders can always adopt the following steps to build cohesive and effective teams in their office. 

1. Clearly define your teams. Generally, large organisations have one main team and a number of sub teams. A sub team may sometimes have just one member and there can be cases where one single employee is on several sub teams. 

2. Hold a meeting of the teams and ask them to define their goals. This is all the more important because many times sub teams require help from other sub teams and this can be sought in such meetings. Top managements will need to prepare the employees for this type of meetings by providing information about such meetings well in time. Giving them information about what they will be asked would be very good as this will enable them to prepare proper responses. The meeting can be concluded after all participants have come up with their objectives and needs. Care should be taken not to mention the words teamwork or teambuilding. 

3. In subsequent meetings, each employee should be given a chance to report as to what sort of assistance he is receiving from other sub teams. Focus on positive facts and always appreciate those teams that have {[extended assistance to other teams. This may take a few meetings for employees to pick up this culture of asking how the other sub teams are cooperating. Sometimes your employees may be a bit slow, but don't give up][28]}. Here again avoid using the words team work or team building.

 4. Make sub team assistance an important component of performance review. Employees should be asked to report how they assisted other teams while they achieved their goals. The above are a few skills necessary to build team spirit in your organisation. Do not forget that the employees are oriented towards teamwork and as leaders of the organisation you need to just integrate the teamwork practices into the day to day operations of your organisation.

 This does not require any extraordinary games or exercises.

HISTORY OF STORY 

Story!!! A well k known word, isn't it? Every one of us knows exactly, what it means. We all must have heard stories of animals, fairies, jungle etc. from our grandmothers or mothers. Do you know how these stories came into existence? Well, actually it's a long- long story in itself. 

Before the advent of a written history, the elders of ancient civilization used stories to teach the new generation. They taught, through stories, the lessons related to their values, how they came into existence; how they learned to fulfill their basic necessities like food, shelter etc. Their stories also gave information about how the sun, earth, moon and stars came into existence. 

Over a period of time, the focus of telling a story shifted from explanation to ease of teaching. As literacy became more prevalent and written works were used for teaching purpose to a greater extent, the long stories were reduced to their basic essence. For example "The Seven Days of Creation in Genesis" was reduced to what is now known as "The Big Bang Theory".

 The past actually happened, but history is what someone wrote down. 

Memories are the key, not to the past but to the future. 

Story telling is an art at the most basic level; it is a means of transmitting ideas from one person to another. It helps the people to make sense of the world. In other words, by writing about one's experiences, dilemmas and hardships, he/she can educate, inspire and build rapport with others. Stories are a means of communicating, recreating and reserving cultures by translating memories into a more concrete manner that can be handed down, verbally or in written form, to the younger generation.

There are many benefits of listening or telling stories like 

1. Stories help people to explore other's ways of doing, feeling, thinking and behaving.

 2. Forming a story about one's own life experiences improves the physical and mental health of the individual. 

3. It is one of the oldest healing arts. 

4. It is a universal and useful way for the grieving person to cope with the loss.

 5. Developing a narrative allows a person to weave together his life changes into a more cohesive form. 

6. Stories hold families together, by passing the information from older generation to the younger one. 

7. Stories help to preserve one's culture.

Listening is an important part of a story telling session. The story telling is more effective only if the listener is attentively and empathetically devoted to the story session. It requires the listener to maintain an active presence, empathy and openness to hear the person, telling the story. 

In today's busy and highly mobile life, stories and storytelling have an important role to play. Not only have these stories made the children aware of their rich cultural heritage, customs and norms of society, but also make the familial bond stronger. So, parents must take some time off their busy schedules and spend quality time with their children to facilitate the process of passing down the stories from their history to the next generation.