Music as a way to motivate employees

I'm sure, like me, you will have been on many "team building days" - those times out of the office where you have to mingle, socialise and play "games" with your fellow employees with the vain hope leaders have of motivating staff. Do team building days work as a way to motivate staff? I have to say I don't think I have ever been on one that has had long lasting positive effects, but maybe I just worked for really bad companies that needed to use team building days in the hope of motivating employees and hope they stayed motivated.

But is there a better way of engaging with and motivating employees? Have you heard of the "Otis Redding Problem?"

Anecdote: Employee engagement Archives

This is where you put in place too many metrics to measure individuals, teams, or business units. meaning they can’t even think about all of them at once. They therefore end-up doing what they believe are important or that will bring them rewards.

This is based on the line from the famous Otis Redding song Sitting By the Dock of the Bay; “Can’t do what ten people tell me to do, so I guess I’ll remain the same.”

Say you wanted to explore levels of engagement within a team or department. Asking straight out is unlikely to get you an accurate picture, depending on the culture, environment, who is present etc.

What you could do is get groups to come up with, say, a written 'Playlist' of songs that sum up levels of engagement for them within the team. Or you could give them an iPod and get them to actually create one and play it back to the room.

If you can take the fear out of saying what you really feel, using a simple a technique as music, how else can we engage our employees?