Professor Jackson Nickerson offers advice for managers faced with unmotivated employees during times of budget cutbacks, salary freezes and fiscal uncertainty in his new column in Government Executive magazine.

Neil Schoenherr reports:

As the financial crisis in America persists, government positions are being cut, experienced and productive government workers are leaving for the private sector and work is being reassigned to an increasingly overloaded workforce, causing motivation to spiral downward.

What is different in the current crisis is that some say fiscal pressure may persist for a decade or more. How can worker motivation in government positions not hit bottom?
Jackson Nickerson, PhD, the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy at Washington University’s Olin Business School, suggests employee motivation comes from three different sources: economic, social and emotional, and ideological.

“To be sure, keeping your workforce motivated to deliver first class service must seem like being between a rock and a hard place,” says Nickerson, associate dean and director of Brookings Executive Education, in a recent forum in Government Executive magazine.

“Yet through your imagination and creativity you can make headway on retaining your high performing workforce by leveraging these three sources of motivation. With the importance of intelligence analysis, our nation depends on it.”
Nickerson’s column is available at Government Exectuive magazine.

Jackson Nickerson is the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, the Associate Dean and Director of the Brookings Executive Education, and a Senior Scholar in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. An award winning researcher and teacher, Jackson specializes in leadership, strategic and critical thinking, leading change, and innovation. While in a prior life he worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he now advises government agencies, not-for profits, and for-profit businesses on ways to improve performance. He is the author of Leading Change in a Web 2.1 World.