According to Capodagli and Jackson, there are motivational and leadership strategies that Disney Company uses to keep its employees motivated. Disney management team believes in motivating employees to achieve the best from employees and the organization (Capodagli and Jackson, 1999). The company encourages its employees to strive and improve their creativity and talents. For instance, Disney has several employees, imagineers who are only responsible for developing creative ideas. This process of developing ideas extends beyond imagineers as the company encourages others to bring their creative ideas. Consequently, Disney has been able to promote and retain its best talents.
Disney also has a positive working environment. This is the company’s initial strategy in motivating its employees. Disney goes beyond the ordinary and believes in providing the needs of its employees. The company has staff centers in its theme parks that offer assistance to its employees. Employee centers offer discounts to its staff, bus passes, childcare materials, money order services, and cash checking among other services. The company knows that providing a motivating working environment by taking care of staff needs is a motivating tool that increases employees’ loyalty to the company.
Disney has employees’ benefits and rewards ranging from comprehensive health cover, life, dental to hefty salaries among others benefits. Employees have opportunities of climbing up the ladder because of the size of the company. They see opportunities for promotion and advancement of careers. This is a motivating factor among several employees working for Disney.
Disney Company has some of best employees’ motivation approaches. For instance, the company has a policy to encourage employees’ empowerment and teamwork. Teamwork enables the company to achieve employees’ loyalty, commitment and retention. The company encourages every employee to perform any task, particularly in generation of creative ideas. The successive managements have encouraged teamwork and empowerment of employees in the legacy of Walt Disney. Occasionally, Disney CEO involves frontline workers in search for information and implementation of ideas. Empowerment and teamwork are essential in motivating employees. Thus, Disney is able to reduce employees’ turnover as compared to its competitors.
Though Disney Company exhibits excellent motivational approaches among its competitions, the company can still improve on some aspects. In any organization, getting continuous feedback is an ongoing process. When there is no continuous feedback, employees do not know what elements of their performances need improvement in relation to the company’s expectation, and their performances.
Disney Company should increase and encourage sharing of results through engaging employees in open forums. Sharing of job outcomes encourages and motivates the employees by knowing aspects of job performances that reflect the company’s overall goal and individual job expectations. Feedback is necessary in generating company’s knowledge base for future management.
Feedback is a part of any job. This is because almost all aspects of jobs are liable to mistakes from employees. Mistakes help employees improve on their future performances as they learn. At the same time, Disney Company should have rewards that complement jobs well performed. The company must also note that recognition is a strong tool for motivating both performers and non-performers. Therefore, the management should recognize any outstanding performance and give appropriate rewards. However, in giving rewards, the company should stick to its decisions. Rewarding employees must be fair. Choosing a few in a group task may results into discontent among some employees. Therefore, reward system must recognize the best out of the group. However, despite giving these rewards, the company must encourage teamwork and knowledge sharing in all its tasks.
Reference
Capodagli, B. and Jackson, L. (1999). The Disney Way: Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company. New York: McGraw-Hill.