Motivated employees are crucial to a company's success—this has never been truer than today, when margins are thin (or nonexistent) and economic recovery remains elusive. These hard bottom-line realities may also mean that managers can't rely as much as they might have in the past on using financial incentives to drive employee engagement.
So how do you keep people motivated and productive?
One answer lies in the concept of the career anchor, first developed some thirty years ago by Edgar Schein, a Sloan Fellows Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Schein says that people are primarily motivated by one of eight anchors—priorities that define how they see themselves and how they see their work.
