HR Strategies to Energize Your Team with Paul Yoachum, FindMojo

In this episode, we consider why motivation is key to employee retention and higher performance. The guest this time is Paul Yoachum, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at FindMojo, the creators of the Motivators Assessment, the workplace motivation assessment.

Paul is responsible for overseeing the company’s growth, customer acquisition, content, and product strategy. He is a frequent speaker at training and leadership events throughout North America where he speaks on sales performance, employee motivation and productivity, corporate culture, and teamwork. He also guest lectures at universities and non-profit organizations throughout the country on a variety of organizational management topics.

Questions for Paul include: 

• Launched amid the pandemic, FindMojo is doing great! You've seen annual revenue double each year. Tell us about the company's mission and goals
• Why is motivation key to employee retention and higher performance?
• What are the big motivators at the moment? E.g. higher salaries, benefits, professional development, CSR? 
• Are Gen Zers motivated by having the option to be back in the office? 
• The Motivators Assessment helps organizations, teams, and individuals. Tell us more about the fit for each group

We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.

Chapters

• 0:03 Employee Motivation and Engagement Discussion
• 13:38 Motivational Factors in the Workplace
• 23:43 Motivators in the Workplace

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. I'm your host today, bill Bannum, and in this episode we're going to focus on the why and the how of employee motivation and engagement. My awesome guest today is a lovely guy is Paul Yokam, co-founder and managing partner over at FindMojo, the creators of the motivators assessment, the workplace motivation assessment. As a co-founder, managing partner and CMO, paul is responsible for overseeing the company's growth, customer acquisition, content and product strategy. Paul is a frequent speaker at training and leadership events throughout North America, where he speaks on sales performance, employee motivations, brass brass and productivity, corporate culture and teamwork. He also guest lectures at universities and nonprofit organizations throughout the US on a variety of organizational management related topics. Did I mention he's a lovely chap too, paul, welcome to the show today.

Speaker 3: 1:27

Thanks, Bill, Glad to be here, Excited to chat with you today. I love that introduction. I want to get that recording and use that for all future events. Just when I'm ever introduced, I'm going to just say here listen to this awesome British voice and just go with it.

Speaker 2: 1:42

Your North American audience at your events will never understand the word Okay, you're welcome to do so. Okay, so be on my reintroduction there. Paul, why don't you start by taking a minute or two and introducing yourself to our audience today?

Speaker 3: 1:56

Yeah, you bet. So I'm Paul Yocum with Fine Mojo. I'm based in Utah For those that know the area, I'm about an hour south of Salt Lake City. I've been in the training and consulting and assessment space now for oh geez, I guess long close to 16, 17 years.

Speaker 3: 2:12

Prior to founding Fine Mojo, I worked for other corporate training companies, many that are pretty widely well known, and I love this. This is kind of my life's calling. My parents were both school teachers and they told me whatever you do, don't be a school teacher in life. And I still found my way into teaching and training, albeit through a different door than academia, and so, yeah, I love working with consultants and coaches and clients to really help them understand what drives their people, what gets people excited and out of bed in the morning, how to solve this sticky and difficult engagement problem that almost every organization faces. So, yeah, we've been doing this now here at Fine Mojo for the last couple of years and have seen a ton of success been able to work with some really, really great clients to help them solve some difficult people challenges that every organization tends to face.

Speaker 2: 3:15

Yeah, so you are a fairly new company. In fact, you launched during the pandemic very brave of you to do so, if I can say that and FindMojo is doing fantastically well. In fact, the first couple of years there you saw annual revenue doubling every couple of years. Not sure about last year as well. I'm sure that was an excellent year too. Tell us about the company's mission and the goals.

Speaker 3: 3:43

Yeah, we were actually a different company before FindMojo. We were a company that kind of was a leadership consultancy company. We focused on cultural transformation and we had this motivators assessment tool. That was just kind of. It was just in our toolkit. We weren't really focused exclusively on that and, of course, when the pandemic hit, training initiatives, speaking initiatives, all just kind of dried up literally overnight. But what we found was that organizations were still looking for ways to, they were looking for data, they were looking for way tools to help their people feel more connected to their work, and so essentially we doubled down and took the company that we had and we split it into two different companies, one being FindMojo. That essentially just focused on all things workplace motivation and engagement, and it literally saved us through the pandemic to the point where we were thriving and growing even beyond more than what we had been doing prior to the pandemic, when we had even a broader tool, you know, an array of products in our portfolio, and it's been great ever since.

Speaker 3: 4:52

We've learned a few things in the pandemic. One of the things we learned pretty we had a suspicion about, but we learned that. We'll talk more about this we learned that people's motivators change. So what's important to you today may not be as important to you six or 12 months down the road. And because of that, these organizations had a need to want to assess their people on a pretty regular basis.

Speaker 3: 5:14

So we pivoted from being kind of a traditional training company to almost more of a technology company. We invested and built out a platform to enable people to take this motivators assessment that we'll talk about and really see what motivators changed over time. What's important to you today, at this moment? And as such, we were able to kind of license this assessment tool and it helped us grow by leaps and bounds by going from just a consultancy business that you know had kind of an end date after projects to more of a recurring license business. So it was a blessing in a lot of ways and it kind of helped us recalibrate what we do every day and also help us spread our message and help more organizations.

Speaker 2: 6:03

I love it when I hear a story like that, where something terrible like the pandemic caused folks to pivots and actually you know what they're thriving now. At the time they might have been like oh my goodness me, you know what's what's going to happen here, and look at you a few years on and how worried you guys are doing so congratulations. It's great to hear that.

Speaker 1: 6:22

Yeah, thanks.

Speaker 2: 6:24

So here's the question for you to really get things going why is motivation key to employ your attention and higher levels of performance, ie, if your folks aren't motivated, are they more likely to leave? And the ones who do stick around, are they more likely to be suffering from, for example, presentism?

Speaker 3: 6:47

Yeah, great question. Let me see if I can answer this as kind of distinctly as possible. You know, gallup has been talking about global employee engagement for 20 plus years, and every year their annual report talks about the state of disengagement. 87% of the world's workers are disengaged or actively disengaged. And then we've seen this whole quiet quitting initiative where people essentially have quit but still come to work. You coupled that with the reasons why people quit a job, and pay isn't even in most surveys. It isn't even in the top five anymore. It's my manager. Still, I don't feel appreciated for work, I feel stuck, I'm not progressing in my career. And so you look at all these factors and you think, well, why is motivation really not? Why is this still not changing?

Speaker 3: 7:37

We've had personality assessments, we've had strength based assessments, and really what we've found is that just because you're good at something and just because you're well paid doesn't necessarily mean or guarantee that you'll be excited and happy at work. And so we created this motivators assessment to take a different approach to what had been done in terms of workplace engagement and retention, and what we simply found, long story short, is that when people can do more of what they love and what they're passionate about. They will stay longer, maybe not forever, but they will be more loyal and more engaged when they're doing things that are fulfilling and engaging to them. So this assessment tool that we created we conducted it. It took us 10 years to create.

Speaker 3: 8:24

We looked at a 10 year study on workplace motivation engagement, looked at every single factor known to man in terms of why people want to quit a job, what factors increase and decrease levels of motivation, and so on and so forth. We looked at more than a million surveys from working adults around the globe and analyzed millions and millions of data points, which our team of organizational psychologists and psychometricians essentially that they mined and cultivated. We ultimately landed on these 23 common motivators that we, as working adults, all share as human beings, and we just have them in a different order. So if organizations or managers can start to tap into what those motivators of people are and align their work with what those motivators are, people will be. They'll do more work, they'll pay greater attention to detail, they'll typically earn more and, at the end of the day, they'll be happier at work, and so that's what we're finding is driving more simply, you know, engagement and retention is just helping people eliminate a little bit about what's frustrating and letting them do a little bit more of what they enjoy.

Speaker 2: 9:35

Okay, so 10 years, a million I think it's a million surveys you guys have sifted through over a 10 year period. That sounds like a pretty huge sample size to me, but let's drill down in that a little bit more. Was that across all industries or all company sizes? Did you see certain industries, for example, were still motivated by money, Because, I mean, that's a big statement to make right the money's not even on the top five top motivators these days? Tell us a bit more about that sample.

Speaker 3: 10:06

Yeah, yeah, the study was. It was global. We partnered with an organization called Willis Towers Watson, which is a big research and data firm, and it was all industries, all levels of different types of employees. So from the C level all the way down to the front line, it was companies of all sizes, different roles and job functions. So, whether it was accounting, sales, marketing, you know, whatever we looked at, every data point you can consider and you know something that jumped out at us. It's pretty interesting.

Speaker 3: 10:41

One of our findings, bill, is when you talk to sales leaders, for example, and you ask them well, what motivates sales people, 9.5 out of 10 of them are going to say money. And while money isn't certainly a motivator for people we all have bills we want to pay, we need trips to go on, we need to buy things it's interesting that money as a motivator Only shows up as a strong motivator for salespeople about 17% of the time. That means 83% of salespeople are motivated by other things other than money. Now, money is important. It's a way they keep score, for sure.

Speaker 3: 11:22

But if money is, compensation is equal. All things being equal, it's not going to be a core driver. You can give a person a salesperson or any person for that matter a raise and that dopamine hit of a bump of money If it's not a core driver for you. We'll last about two weeks and then other things start to become more important. So that was a huge finding, because there's this giant myth that all salespeople are motivated by money and so many sales leaders just throw more money at them. People are generally appreciative of it, but at the end of the day, most people are motivated by a myriad of other things besides money. That's just one of the many findings that we found in the research. That was rather eye-opening for us.

Speaker 2: 12:14

Okay, continue to open my eyes then, paul, please, please. I know this is an audio podcast, but this is my eyes are very big right now. What are these other intrinsic motivators at the moment, then? Are they, for example, professional development? We're seeing that 2024 is a year where a lot of people are staying in their jobs. They're not moving around like they were over the last few years, and therefore professional development is very important to them. Are we seeing that CSR corporate social responsibility is very important to certain folks who are joining the workforce or are really in the workforce, for example, those Gen Z's? We often hear that CSR is incredibly important to them. What about benefits? Surely, even if to you, for example, they're with sales folks, even if 83%, I think you said we're not motivated by money is number one, I bet they appreciate good benefits. Tell us a bit more about that.

Speaker 3: 13:09

Yeah, so you just described three scenarios. So I mentioned these 23 motivators that we all share and you just described essentially three of them. We just kind of use different words, so, again, these are all positive concepts. So you mentioned personal development. Well, developing others is a motivator. Learning is a motivator. These are motivators.

Speaker 3: 13:30

So that's a big one for a lot of folks. You mentioned social responsibility. That's a motivator. Impact is a motivator.

Speaker 3: 13:38

Purpose is a motivator and we have seen in millennials, in Gen Z, when you look at what's most important and shows up the most often as a motivator for those generations. Now, granted, there's always outliers, but when you look at them in aggregate impact purpose, those show up as top three motivators the most they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to make sure the work that they do, they want to see the results that they're driving. They want to feel like they're making a difference and an impact. You mentioned benefits. Family is a huge motivator for a lot of people and the reason they work is because they want to work in a flexible work schedule. They want to make sure their family's taking care, they want to leave a legacy.

Speaker 3: 14:22

So you nailed three of the 23 motivators, just with slightly different words, but they can map directly to these. These concepts and most of these motivators we talk about are intrinsic in nature. There are some extrinsic ones, of course, like recognition and prestige and money, but most of these concepts are intrinsic things like economy, challenge, pressure, ownership, service, you know and I, and on and on and on. And yeah, all the guests that listen to this will have the opportunity to take this assessment and discover how they're. 23 motivators, ranked from 1 to 23. So, but yeah, those, those are just three of a handful of things that are driving folks, especially the younger generations, as you mentioned. If you're a manager of Gen Z and Millennials and you've discovered what motivates them, which is probably Purpose, learning, impact, at least based on our data, and you're not providing opportunities for them to learn and grow and be mentored and coach, you're falling behind as a manager.

Speaker 2: 15:29

Well, just on that note, actually, and then and then we'll continue you through. Are you guys seeing anything in your data in terms of how many Gen Z is how many more junior folks within organizations are Motivated by being actually being in the office or having an opportunity to be in the office? For that personal development piece because I often talk about this on the show I think back to my early career sitting in the office. All the stuff you learn by osmosis just by Hearing other people chatter around at the water cooler, understanding office politics. That's important when you're getting going in your career. Do you guys have any information around this?

Speaker 3: 16:06

Yeah, great question. You know we look at this Slightly different lens, but I think it'll tie here. When you look at the motivators Through the lens of motivators for this younger generation, they are more collaborative. They don't typically like to be the person in charge, so things like ownership and autonomy, these are lower motivators.

Speaker 3: 16:29

Now we haven't really done specifically into the Working remote versus working in the office issue as it relates, but if you look at their motivators Friendship, teamwork, it's all has to do with things that are related to collaboration, right?

Speaker 3: 16:45

So whether you're in the office or you're in a remote environment, you want to make sure that they feel like they're collaborating with others.

Speaker 3: 16:53

If you are a remote environment, well, we, we were kind of agnostic, we're kind of taking the position of, like Switzerland on the whole remote work thing or return to office. We there's other dynamics at play there and so we're not necessarily taking a stance one or the one way or the other. We feel like there's certainly advantages to each model and so we've got a lot of clients that are thriving in a fully remote environment, a lot of clients that are Thriving in a return to office environment and, frankly, clients that are in both environments that are struggling. So our mantra is more around like understand what drives people, what's it gets them excited? What gets them to come to bed. You get out of bed in the morning and come to work, and when you look at those younger generations, it really is more about Collaboration. So we're encouraging our clients to put more emphasis on how can you make them feel connected to their work and to their teammates, regardless of the environment in which they currently are.

Speaker 2: 17:53

Thank you, paul, now that you or team does a great job Explaining what you guys do and also what find mojo, or who find mojo is aimed at, and you break that down into three different groups. Okay, so you say that the motor motor faders assessment helps organizations, teams and individuals. So, if it's okay with you, so I'd like to challenge you now To talk to our listeners about each of those different groups the organizations, the teams and the Individuals and talk a little bit about how you specifically help each of those. But the challenge comes in I want you to tell me about each of those in 90 seconds or less. Let's start with the organization. So the general premise here is License the motor page assessment and scale and measure employee motivation across the entire organization. Tell us more about that in 90 seconds or less.

Speaker 3: 18:52

Yeah, a lot of organizations. They'll get their annual employee engagement survey back and it's not where they want it to be, or they'll improve in one area but decrease in another area. They're they're playing employee engagement whack-a-mole is what I call it and so what they're doing is that they're they're not teaching their managers and their leaders how Most of those leaders are disengaged themselves. So how are they going to get other people to be engaged? With one CEO, we asked him how many people work with his company and he told us about 50% of them. We said no, no headcount in his mind. Only half of his workforce is showing up and giving their best selves to work. So we approach this from an organizational perspective in terms of how can we improve employee engagement scores in 30 days? And we have a model that we teach that builds on specific applications for the motivators assessments. So that's kind of the organizational angle.

Speaker 2: 19:42

And those scores? Yes, but I just I was just gonna follow up there. Those scores are important, for example, in terms of attracting new talent, right, 100%.

Speaker 3: 19:53

A lot, of, a lot of today's workers are looking at not what the compensation package looks like, but what is the work environment, what is the culture? What can you do for me? What can you want? To begin be part of a cause, part of a mission, right, and you know we have things like glass door and all these plays. It's not hard to to pinpoint whether an organization sucks to work for or not today, and and so it's important, you know, being a best place to work for, is is critical for it from an organization now, yeah, to retain talent and right and attract, you know, top talent. For sure I.

Speaker 2: 20:29

Okay, let's talk about teams and that second group. So premise here is better understand your team members by discovering motivational synergies, uniqueness and and Cautions. This is interesting 90 seconds on this one or less go yeah, you bet.

Speaker 3: 20:43

So we work with a lot of managers who are just trying to get more out of their people. They're just trying to Help their people find more fulfillment in their work. So what we'll do is we'll take the motivators assessment and after everybody's taken it, we'll create a team report. We'll put their motivators side by side on a grid and we'll see what they have in common, what they have that's unique, that nobody on the team has, and this helps the manager kind of Align people's work projects based on what people like. And then cautions.

Speaker 3: 21:11

For example, I just worked with a manager from Wendy's. She had pressure as a number one motivator. She loves tight deadlines. They know that sounds crazy. She thrives when the lights are brightest. She has an employee who has pressure as a dead last motivator. She was constantly stressing this employee out because she would get excited under tight deadlines. This employee, while she had the skill set to be able to complete the tasks, certainly didn't wake up in the morning wanting to go to work and get excited about tight deadlines so she could get the job done. But then she was constantly stressed out, ended up wanting to leave the company and this was eye-opening for the manager, completely changed the relationship and how they work together. They had motivators that were really far out of alignment and it was impacting the relationship.

Speaker 2: 21:55

Very, very good. Okay, and then for individuals discover your core motivators. This is premise discover your core motivators and what gets you excited at work, regardless of your current role or work situation. I'd also like to add in there Can you also very briefly tell us about what gets you excited with your job? Do all of that in under 90 seconds.

Speaker 3: 22:17

Yeah, so the the, the assessment itself, was built from an individual perspective. It's very personal. Certainly there are team and organizational applications, but the end of the day it starts with the individual, and so if you think about why employee engagement hasn't been solved well, so many managers just have a tendency to treat everybody the same, because it's easier, because it's fair and In reality you have a team of people and they can all be wired differently. So if we had a listenership of a million people here that that had taken the assessment, we might find two people out of that a million that have all 23 motivators in the same order. So while we have the same motivators we're just we just have different priorities. We have things that are wired.

Speaker 3: 23:01

You know we're all wired differently and so a lot of individual people don't like their jobs, and so we created this assessment just to help people find a spark. The assessment tool, the assessment tool, has a 40 page report that Will give you ideas on how to enhance your value, what your blind spots are, where you can thrive in the organization. So all sorts of strategies For you as a person to do. You know, find a little bit more fulfillment, at least have a conversation with your boss about what you enjoy doing.

Speaker 2: 23:30

And what's one of your key motivators? Pull what gets you out of bed in the morning.

Speaker 3: 23:34

Yeah, so I'm what we call a thinker. So these motivators group together in the what into these five archetypes that we created called identities. One of those is being a thinker, so I am motivated by things like learning, creativity. My number one motivator, believe it or not, is autonomy, and so I prefer to go, and if you try to micro manage me, it's probably why I'm an entrepreneur and and and have been more fulfilled doing my own thing than working for somebody else.

Speaker 3: 24:08

Fun is a top motivator for me if I work in an environment where people take themselves too seriously and can't laugh. It's the motivating Families a top motivator for me. So I certainly like work by balance. I want to make my family proud. I would rather have more family time per year than maybe a raise. Yeah, so those that's just a handful. Those are some of my top seven which are our strong motivators. And, and yeah, learning, autonomy, creativity, impact, excelling. I get excited by getting things done, checking the box. I get frustrated if things aren't moving along. So, yeah, that's. That's a little bit about me. Those are kind of my top ones out of the 23.

Speaker 2: 24:50

Okay, so they're 23. I feel like throughout this conversation today, we've probably mentioned at least a dozen of them. Of the ones that we haven't mentioned yet, pull Is are there any that would surprise people and any that people like huh, I had not even thought about that as a motivator.

Speaker 3: 25:07

Yeah, well, let's just let me just run down the list here really quick. So, autonomy, challenge, creativity, developing others, empathy there are people who go to work to listen to other people and solve their problems, excelling, excitement. You know there's people who want a little bit of risk in their work family, friendship, fun, impact, learning, money, ownership, pressure, prestige, problem solving, purpose, recognition, service, social responsibility that's an interesting service and social responsibility People want to be part of a cause, teamwork and variety. So I think we've mentioned most of these. They are all pretty universal in nature in terms of we look at it through a workplace perspective, right, but I've had my teenage children take it. We've had, you know, college kids take it higher. You know, k through 12 schools use this assessment and, and and still have found tremendous value in it because a lot of these concepts are universal in nature.

Speaker 2: 26:05

Okay, very impressive. What's more impressive, paul, is that you did that in alphabetical order Good work. Okay, sir, we are almost at the end of this particular conversation today. Before we do wrap up, how can all listeners connect with you? So maybe that's LinkedIn, Maybe you might want to show your email address, maybe you're super cool and all over tick, tock and places. And, of course, how can they learn more about fine motor?

Speaker 3: 26:26

Yeah, thanks, bill. Certainly I'm on LinkedIn. Paul Yocum why, oh a CHUM. I'd love to connect with Like-minded individuals who are really you know, I'll connect with everybody, but I love interacting and engaging with folks who are trying to make work better for other people. Email address P Yocum, at fine mojo, spelled the same way. And, last but not least, I'd love for anybody that's listening, bill, to be able to take this assessment. We usually charge $75 for it, but, as as part of our sponsorship with HR Gazette, we'd love to allow people to take it at no cost.

Speaker 3: 27:05

So all you've got to do is go out to find mojocom forward slash request and you just fill out the little form and we'll send you an assessment. It's a hundred questions, it'll take you about ten minutes to complete and your results will be emailed right to you. You can download them right when you complete it and I think you'll find it pretty fascinating. Everybody most everybody that takes the assessment will find things that are confirming, especially if they've answered the questions you know honestly. But there will be a surprise or two.

Speaker 3: 27:33

You'll be surprised. You know. You might be the, the person that has seven children and has family dead last, and you'll wonder if you're a bad parent or you know you love to go out to happy hour but you have fun in your bottom three and you're like am I a fun person? So there might be a surprise or two, but I think for the most part people will be pretty. You know, the common term we hear is wow, this is kind of scary accurate. I can't believe how accurate this is in terms of nailing what is important to me. So find mojocom slash request.

Speaker 2: 28:02

That's request. We love it when our guests give stuff away to our audience. Thank you very much. Well, that does leave me to say for today Paul, you are a gentleman. It's been lovely getting to know you. I have had a lovely experience with you today on this show. I hope to do it again with you soon, but for now, sir, thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR chat show. Anytime, thanks for having me, bill, a lot of fun and listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 28:34

Thanks for listening to the HR chat show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and Remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HR Gazette comm.