Research On R&D Employees' Motivation Of Ruifeng Industrial Co., LTD

With the trend of globalization of the world economy, technical innovative ability has become one of the key factors of companies'core competence. R&D staff, as the main employees of the company for innovation, their work performance has significantly influenced the final result of companies'creative activities.Ruifeng Industrial Co., Ltd, a rapidly grown-up Chinese private company, has decided to change its main business scope from previously OEM production of TV heat-disposal band and electric mobile tools to automobile parts. Along with this change, the company's R&D division would also be expanded from currently 12 employees to 45 within coming two year. The R&D capability is one of the most important indicators to the market of the quality to the product. This article focuses on how to motivate the R&D employees to get the best performance.R&D staff has quite a few special characteristics compared with other employees, e.g. higher educational background, rich of work experience in the fields, engaged with innovative tasks, which is very difficult to evaluate the performance of their work, and also hard to monitor how hard they are working. They are also special in their characters. Nevertheless, their unique needs of motivations were ignored by the company. The company applies same measures to all the employees, which cause the R&D staff have not been sufficiently motivated.There are a few researches on motivation of R&D staff. Most of the researches focus on motivation needs and vocational trends of the R&D employees. They paid less attention to the motivation target of the company. At last, nearly every thesis of the kind working on find out the special needs of the R&D staff, and then give suggestions of how to satisfy the R&D employees by meet their needs. In fact, motivation doesn't mean to fully satisfy the employee by giving what the employees need. After we find out the most significant motivate factors, we must consider how shall we utilize our findings to lead employees work hard, so that the company's goal could be meet first, and then the employees'needs would also be meet. This article, right from the beginning, focuses the company's target to the study. We made investigations, get the company's motivation target from the boss, from related departments and from customers. The study shows, there are totally 4 main targets to the R&D motivation systems: To keep the stability of the R&D employees; To encourage R&D staff to continuously study the most advanced technology; To enrich the R&D staff's ability and willingness of team work; To encourage R&D staff to the optimization of the present process.The study is based on Fredrick Herzberg's Motivator-Hygiene Theory, whereas the currently study of the theory was also taken account. As a result, we use the theory in this way: employees'needs of hygiene factors must be meet first without any additional requirements, so that dissatisfaction can be removed, and then motivation factors must be utilized to lead employee for working harder. In accordance with this basic belief, the motivate model of Ruifeng R&D staff was introduced to guide the final system design of the motivation systems of the company. Since there are already a few studies concerning R&D employees'motivation needs and vocational trends, this article focuses more on how to utilize the study results, to setup motivation system of the company with regards to meet the company's goal. Main activities of this study include: Brain storm to find out activities which can meet R&D staff's needs; Relationship analysis of the found activities with company goal; Positive activities were collected to form the motivation system by means of a matrix; Detailed design of the activities selected.Efforts were also made to reduce the cost of implementation of the motivation system. We tried our best to optimize the current procedures/ rules/ regulations, rather than create a brand new procedure. For example, management review and quality system internal audit were selected to monitor the feasibility of the motivation system. Main findings of our study include:1. Through open questionnaire, 10 motivation/ hygiene factors were found: Total income 19.63% Work is clearly defined 16.48% Acknowledgement of performance 14.44% Team work environment 14.07% Opinions can be recognized by the company 13.15% Stable work 8.52% Effective trainings 5.37% Comfortable environment 3.33% Space of promotion 2.96% Challenging work 2.04%2,Totally 17 activities were found by brain storm, and finally 12 activities were selected to form the motivation system (5 activities were taken out because they have not enough contribute to the company goal): Add feasibility evaluation of motivation system to Management Review Add feasibility evaluation of motivation system to the internal system audit of ISO/TS 16949 Redefined work description of R&D staff by tools of process study; Keizen system to improve the motivation system Suitable salary level Evaluation the working environment Office automation system Dynamic KPI system Internal teacher system Lesson learn system of the project management Bonus system to best performance team Pressure of lost job3,Last chapter consists of detailed design of the system, in which, author's working experience in management of automobile industry was fully utilized, and cost effectiveness of the system were significantly considered.