Download this best practice team motivation audit survey that accompanies the book Managing People.
To understand how motivated your team is, especially if you're inheriting a new group of employees that you haven't worked with before, conducting a team motivation audit will help you understand how each feels towards their job and the organisation as a whole.
This survey has been designed to assess the four areas of motivation that Simon Birkenhead describes in his book Managing People:
Play
Potential
Purpose
Pressure
This page provides a best practice survey to assess employee motivation that you can download, adapt and execute yourself.
Alternatively, if you have time, you could also conduct a full Employee Engagement Survey.
Question List
This survey asks each participant questions that have been designed to illuminate how strongly their intrinsic motivation is to work hard and produce high quality outputs. It also aims to assess whether any extrinsic motivations are supporting their efforts or acting as a distraction.
Participants should be asked to answer each question with a score of 1 to 4, with 1 indicating they Strongly Disagree with the statement and 4 indicating they Strongly Agree with it.
A range of 1 to 4 is superior to the typical 1 to 5 scoring system typically used for questionnaires. With a 1 to 5 system it is easy for participants to choose 3, indicating they neither agree nor disagree with the statement. However, the reality is that people will generally always feel positive or negative towards an issue - it is very rare that they truly have no opinion either way. By forcing participants to choose either a negative opinion (1 or 2) or a positive opinion (3 or 4), you will gain a far more insightful view.
Because we always want a score of 4 (Strong Agree) to be a 'good' result (i.e. an indicator of strong employee engagement), each question should be phrased so that if the participant agrees with it then that is a positive result for employee engagement.
Submit the form below to download an example set of questions for a Team Motivation Audit that Simon Birkenhead, author of the book Managing People, has used in his businesses. You'll also gain access to an example online survey using these questions.