Motivational Plan
Sabah Saiyed
LDR/531
February 6, 2014

Motivational Plan
Crafting a motivational plan is very helpful for any organization as well as for its employees. This paper discuss the summary of the mentor's interview including information about mentor's organization, the department in which mentor works in, and his job description. The paper further analyzes specific differences in attitudes, emotions, personalities, and values among the learning team members based on DISC assessment, and address how each difference might be used to positively influence behavior. Lastly, the paper develops a plan that may be applied to the mentor's department and that would increase the learning team member's motivation, satisfaction, and performance based on their personal profiles, as if they were employees of that department.
Mentor's Organization assessment
Mentor works for Comcast Corporation which is a large-scale mass media and technology company. There are two primary businesses of the company; Comcast cable and NBC Universal. Comcast cable provides nationwide services for video, internet and phone to residential as well as business customers, known as XFINITY. The NBC Universal broadcast different channels and networks like news, sports, etc.
Mentor's Job profile
Mentor is associated with department of ERP, Financial Systems and Commercial Services. His job description is of an Operations Architect and it involves activities like ensuring programs are proposed, designed, developed, and implemented to meet business requirements. He has already fulfilled the role of Principal Engineer / Infrastructure Lead. He is involved in designing, building and maintaining Web logic, Tomcat and Apache based application environments for all life cycle stages (Dev, Int, QA, Performance, Production and DR environments). He tracks advances in information technology that can impact the business. He monitors the implementations of improvement process by interacting with various departments in the organization. He assists in creating and developing architectural solution that fits the needs of the business. He also regularly participate as a mentor/ coach, in leading and coaching his team members to update them about the relevant technologies.
Mentor's Team personality and Current motivational plans
The mentor's team supports the applications and the infrastructure that provide the services to the end customers. The team of engineers in the group managed by the mentor need to be self-starters and highly motivated in order to keep the systems running smoothly.
The team comprises of people from various ethnic backgrounds, age, gender, experience and personalities. The resources who have been in the company and with the team from a long time had a little resistance to learning new things, or trying to work at a pace that the younger generation team members are used to. Mentor encouraged the older team members to take responsibilities of tasks and pair them with the younger employees to keep the tasks delivered. The experience and the personal rapport of the older folks in the team used to help clear any roadblocks in getting the tasks accomplished coupled with the fresh and different thinking brought in by the younger team members.
The organization has a rewards program called STAR reward which used to recognize people with financial benefits for their dedication, team work and other qualities and keep them motivated. The company wide STAR rewards program was used extensively to recognize and reward people for their achievements and collaboration. Resources who were performing consistently were given additional flexibility like option to work from home and in some cases lead and manage smaller projects to give them the feeling of leadership. This enabled the employees to get recognition in the leadership circles, resulting in promotions in rank and higher merit pay.
Learning team members personalities analysis based on DISC assessment
The team members have strong ethics and cultural values. Jose is very enthusiastic, persuading and optimistic in nature. He willingly interacts and motivates team members for any given assignment and always ready to help others. But when the work load increases he tends to get disorganized and at times he is unable to follow through the assignment.
On the other hand, Lucas in past have shown tremendous growth in his performance. The secret behind his career advancement is his personality traits. He has qualities like high energy, leadership, administrative and ability to juggle between tasks. There are few drawbacks that may affect his work and personal life. Lucas works or learns things at a fast paced and expects others to work at his pace, when the others can't match up to his expectation, he gets impatient and at times turns a little insensitive toward other members of the team. The worse thing is, in many situation, he takes himself too seriously.
As compared to Lucas, Sharis and Sabah are over-sensitive and lack in leadership qualities like poor at goal setting, slow in action. But definitely they can overcome these weakness with help of their strengths and values. Both Sharis and Sabah look for stability in their actions and result. They aim to achieve their goals as they have characteristics of go-getter. They are good listeners and team players. They have the ability to adapt to changes easily and capable of following the tasks thoroughly.
The team members have qualified resources like their strong personality and values which needs proper motivation that will enable them to overcome their weakness and improve their level of performance. This motivational plan is developed for the mentor's organization with the learning team members playing the roles of the mentor's team members.
Motivation Plan based on team members personal profile
Motivating employees is essential from recruiting to retaining and from productivity to profitability because happy and hardworking employees lead the organization toward success. "Motivation in firms is absolutely important and necessary because it could change the behavior of employees in positive ways. That is why many managers believe that when they establish motivated employees in the workplace, they can observe significant achievements in their organizations" (Aarabi, 2013, para. 1). But motivation cannot be one size fit formula for every employee. One employee gets motivated only by money, another may appreciate rewards and personal recognition.
In the current scenario of the company, developing a Career progression and Reward/ Recognition program are necessary for employee's motivation. It is important to understand what kind of motivation helps the employees and provide them modes to achieve it. When employee's needs are met, there are more chances that they will more responsible and will perform better to accomplish the objectives of the organization (Aarabi, 2013). As the team member have varied personalities, program must be designed to motivate and match them accordingly. The two recommended motivational plan in addition to STAR rewards are; pay for performance and star employee of the month.
Pay for performance is attaching incentives to employee's performance. This will motivate employee to perform better and beyond expectation to earn additional income.
Star employee of the month will recognize and celebrate the success of top performers who consistently exceed their performance goals while improving the company and customers experience. The employees will be offered with scholarship, comprehensive career path program, promotion, awards and personal recognition depending on the level of performance.
Apart from these plans, another recommendation is training and coaching program that must be managed as one on one basis for team members who are slow starters and need a little push to perform as expected. On the other hand, allowing team members to lead team task who have ability to lead and have perform beyond expectation consistently.
Thus, the above recommended motivational program will attach the employee's daily core with the company's strategic business objectives. It will facilitate high performance by providing the employees with all the available sources that will motivate and help them to succeed.

Reference
Aarabi, M. S., Subramaniam, I. D., & Akeel, Abu Baker Almintisir Abu Baker. (2013). Relationship between motivational factors and job performance of employees in Malaysian service industry. Asian Social Science, 9(9), 301-310. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1424326652?accountid=458