Title: Motivation Paper: Maslow's Hierarchy
Author: Tsubasa Kya
Disclaimer: I do not own "Naruto".
This will be AU Naruto and is FINISHED. It is a sequence of four one-shots, so will be thus posted as four one-shots.
I wrote this for Psychology of Human Relations to make writing the paper more interesting. My teacher loved it, and I asked if she had a problem with me posting it online. She said no, so therefore you get to read it! Yay!
For those who want to read all four parts in order:
...Part 1: Maslow's Hierarchy
...Part 2: Theory X and Theory Y
...Part 3: Motivation-Hygiene Theory
...Part 4: Expectancy Theory
I am posting each part separately because I believe they can be read separately. I hope you enjoy each separate part, and offer up a review for feed-back.
YES THIS CONTAINS AN OC AS A MAIN CHARACTER! PLEASE DON'T JUDGE IT BY THAT!
STORY IS WRITTEN IN FIRST PERSON NARRATIVE!
Motivation Paper
Maslow's Hierarchy
My name is Josephine and I am the new manager and business owner of a locally owned business called Gaara's Book & Café. I haven't been here long, but before coming fully into my managerial position, I requested the old manager to give me some time to observe how business functioned and how the employees interacted with each other. I spent a week observing and familiarizing myself with the store.
The business is a neat, cozy little place built right in the heart of the downtown area. Just two blocks away from the store is the hospital; many hospital employees come to the café for lunch, so the standards of cleanliness are set very high among the employees. Two doors down from Gaara's Book and café is Michele's Diner, who the employees in the café half of the business have come to label as 'The Enemy'.
With heavy competition for lunch business so nearby, and health standards raised to adhere to a doctor's standards, I know my job as manager is going to be very difficult. To familiarize myself with the store, café, and the few employees, I set out to get to know the employees and learned the business through their eyes first.
Gaara's Book & Café does not have a lot of employees. Gaara, the previous owner, has decided to move on to a new venue. He, his sister Temari, and his brother Kankuro were the only full-time workers the store had at the time. The part-time workers included Iruka, Kakashi, Konohamaru, and Kiba. Temari and Kankuro both worked in the café, Kankuro as head chef and Temari as a waitress. They have both decided to remain at their jobs here in the café, provided I do what their brother did not and hire more help.
Kankuro and Kiba worked in the café kitchen while Temari was the only waitress. During the lunch hour rush, I have seen all three workers lose their tempers multiple times. I can only imagine what Temari feels having to come into work at five AM to begin preparing the café for the day when the café opens for business at six, and doesn't close until eight PM. Temari doesn't get out of work until nine PM, at which point it would be my guess that she went home immediately and fell asleep.
The bookstore ran with Gaara as a full-time employee, and Iruka, Kakashi, and Konohamaru as part-time help. It opened at nine AM and closed at five PM. The bookstore does get more than enough business, but I have witnessed most of that business going immediately to Gaara. If a customer had a question, they asked him.
In both halves of the business, I know the problem is not entirely a need to gain customers. Great food is produced from the kitchen and the majority is made from organic foods from local farms, and all the meats are purchased straight from the butcher shop on the end of the block. The problem I believe I will need to work on is the employees.
According to Abraham H. Maslow's need hierarchy, one of the most widely used explanations of human motivation, people strive to satisfy the following group of needs in step-by-step order: physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualizing needs.
Physiological needs are bodily needs. Food, water, shelter, and sleep are examples of physiological needs. Temari and Kankuro are working impossible hours and are coming in tired all the time. I believe by hiring more workers to help them, they'll feel far more comfortable in their job without the stress of double shifts five days a week, and by hiring more help, I feel confident that the store can eventually move to weekend hours.
Safety needs refer to actual physical safety and to a feeling of being safe from both physical and emotional injury. I hope to accomplish this safety need through the hiring process as well, because tired workers make mistakes and are more likely to be injured. If there are more workers, I feel less strain will be caused by temper explosions during lunch time, thereby soothing the threat of emotional injury due to a worker saying something stressful to another at work.
The social need is the need of love or of belonging and centers the interaction between two people. I want to make sure all my employees feel like they belong here at Gaara's Book & Café. By making them feel involved in what is happening in management, and being involved in what is happening amongst my employees and letting them know I am always available if they need something, I hope to accomplish this need.
Esteem needs, as Maslow put it, represents an individual's demand to be seen as a person of worth by others and to him- or herself. I feel I can definitely accomplish this through showing my employees that hard work will take them somewhere. To promote that I see them as worthy employees of Gaara's Book & Café, I am going to make sure that my position in the company isn't the 'next level'. I will be implementing 'middle management'. I hope I don't have to specifically hire for middle management, because I feel rising up the business ladder is essential. I'm sure if my workers had the funds to do so, they would have bought the place from Gaara the previous owner.
The last need is self-actualizing needs. As the highest level of needs, I know it will be the hardest to achieve simply due to the fact that I need to cover all the other needs first. This need includes the need for self-fulfillment and personal development. I would really like to see my co-workers reach forward to the future. Once I have accomplished the first four steps of Maslow's Hierarchy, I will be offering benefits to my full-time employees after they have worked with me for a designated period of time. Such benefits will include tuition reimbursement if they decide to go into a field for cooking, or in the case of the bookstore, a career involving journalism or writing.
Once Gaara had left me the store, I closed for the day and had my employees meet me one at a time. The first one I wanted to meet was Temari. The poor girl needed help. She couldn't be expected to continue on like she was.
"Temari," I said to her, "I would like very much to see you have a day at work where you aren't forced to eat lunch in five minutes before heading right back to work. That is why I want to hire help for you. But more than that, I would like you to help me hire help for the waiting staff. Do you think you can do this?"
Temari agreed very quickly. I had her give me suggestions on what she would be looking for in employees. I was going to make her head waitress. Within several minutes, we had put together a suitable ad that could be sent off to the newspaper, and I assured her that when the café opened tomorrow, I would be there to help her waitress. I told her, "I think we can run the ad in the paper for two weeks, and after that we can spend a week doing interviews. In three weeks I will have hired five more people for the wait staff. I believe we can have two shifts, AM and PM, and I'm looking for full-time wait and kitchen staff." She left much happier than she came in, day-dreaming about all the sleep she could catch up on.
Next on the list to talk to was Kankuro and I knew he was going to need a lot more help in the kitchen. As it was, we were going to have to close the café for at least a week while new wait staff was trained, so I set a goal to have the cook ad, which Kankuro helped me write up, run for two weeks. Interviews would be scheduled the same week as for wait staff, and week four we would close up for training the new staff. I don't like that we have to close up, but with so few employees, there was no way the current employees would hold up under the strain.
Once I had talked to the newly appointed head waitress and the head chef, I discussed with the part-time workers what they would like to do with their career at Gaara's Book & Café. Kiba wanted full-time work and hoped to be a supervisor if it was possible. He also preferred working evenings, but Gaara hired him only to work four hours a day around lunch time. That was definitely a possibility, providing his leadership skills were well advanced to where they would need to be. Kankuro wanted a day shift, so I could have Kankuro work from five AM until 1 PM, and Kiba could work from 1 PM until 9 PM. I would hire four more cooks, two for day shift and two for evening shift.
Kiba and Kankuro were both happy with that arrangement, and Kankuro definitely wanted sleep from working as many hours as Temari did in a day. Until the new staff could come, Kiba agreed to work the same hours Kankuro did to help with the strain.
I next spoke with the staff of the bookstore and asked them what they wanted to do with their career with me. I had determined already that out of the two, Iruka would make the best supervisor for the bookstore. I suppose it is in the way he held himself, but I knew either Kakashi or Iruka would be promoted by the end of the day, or I would be putting an ad in the paper for a supervisory position. I can't always be at Gaara's Book & Café. I'm currently checked into a hotel to save on gas and travel time to my new business, but otherwise I live a few hours away. I want to be able to know before I leave for home that someone will be responding and communicating with me. That doesn't mean I'm never going to come in after I get them settled, but I hope it will be okay enough that I can be away for a week and not worry about how they're doing.
Konohamaru was the last one I spoke to; he was the only high school student Gaara had employed. He operated the cash register after school. He told me he enjoyed his job, but he also mentioned that the cash register was broken. He said that it sometimes simply shut off. I checked and found out that the power box was fried. I immediately placed an order for a new power box.
With Iruka and Kakashi accepting full-time work from me, I put an ad in the paper for part-time work for the bookstore.
Two weeks later, I held interviews for staff with the new supervisors at my side. With the help of my employees, I was able to satisfy the needs of those who work for me, and business picked up faster than ever once we reopened after training. My workers are doing well, and are happy to work for me.
I might get extra credit if you review... Sequel is Theory X and Theory Y