To influence workplace motivation in challenging situations we need to start with ourselves. It makes sense for your self, and for those who work with you, to choose to maintain as positive an attitude as possible, even in challenging situations.

Workplace Motivation: Choose your Attitude

How can you choose to respond to a situation?  Four common ways to respond are to:

1. Change the situation – do something about it, be proactive.
2. Change yourself – examine your own attitudes, behaviour, skills, and decide to change them as appropriate.
3. Accept the situation – that is, come to terms with and live with it.
4. Leave the situation – find a constructive way of moving on. Can you avoid the situation, is it possible to move within your organisation. Exhaust all avenues within your own organisation before thinking further afield.

How do you maintain workplace motivation in difficult or changing situations?

Here are 7 tips:

1. Seek opportunities – even in difficult change there are opportunities and positives.  What makes work interesting and what makes it manageable.
2. Be a supportive manager and try to work for one! All the evidence suggest that relationships with your immediate manager matters more than what is happening in the wider organisation. Workplace motivation is made easier when people feel supported and valued by their manager.
3. Be credible; find a pragmatic optimism that is tempered with realism
4. Help others to cope
5. Start where they are and help them to see how they can choose to respond  to the situation. Help them to think through the 4 choices above.
6. Be an example in how you respond
7. Make sure you have your own support network

You can find out more about our Antidotes to Austerity series where our session on motivation in the workplace will help you to re-think motivation when times are tough.

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All improvement is change but not all change is improvement.

What is so disarming about this quotation is that it goes to the heart of what change should be about; the focus of change should be improvement.

Of course sometimes difficult changes have to be made for organisations to be in a position to thrive in the future. It maybe that “surgery” is needed to return an organisation to “health”. This of course should always be, as with the medical profession, a last resource. Prevention and early intervention should always be tried first.

So when budgets are tight and resources are constrained, it’s understandable to feel that your ability to lead is being limited.

In such situations it’s more than likely that you’re being asked to make resource savings. Before jumping to difficult but predicable decisions to cut resources take some time to think.

In recent work we have been doing within public services, the challenge has been to try and hold the tension of coping with constrained budgets and yet still make changes that improve services.

Which leads us to another of the quotes on change that we like. This time it comes from Lord Rutherford (thought of as the father of Nuclear Physics) who in another era once said:

We’ve got no money so we’ve got to think.

One thing that is often in short supply when the pressure is on is time to think. Yet to hold the tension and seek changes that are improvements when there is “no money” more than ever needs time to think.

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