Everyone talks about having, finding, or developing “motivated” employees. Why? Because the “right people” with the “right passion” are two of the four basic competencies necessary for an organization to grow, change and create success. We need employees who are willingly accountable, capable of making real change, optimistic, driven, have a desire to learn and will be instrumental in actively implementing change within our organizations.
Check out Nice Enterprises’ podcast “Become Fishers of Success – Friday, 2/27/09” for more about the difference motivated people can make in an organization.
Unfortunately, finding motivated employees and/or developing motivated employees, often proves to be a difficult task. According to the Gallup Organization, 74% of American employees are disengaged clock watchers. That needs to change. Faced with that statistic and our desire to produce successful and thriving organizations, we can’t rely on artificially “pumping up” our employees. We must make the effort to discern where motivation comes from and how we can encourage its grow.
Discovering what motivates employees is critical because motivated employees are far more productive, better fulfilled, deliver better service quality, and contribute more significantly to their organizations. (For background click employee engagement.)
To better understand motivation, let’s start with a quiz: If I offered you either of two jobs that you had to do for the rest of your life, which would you choose?
- Being an architect for $75,000 per year, or
- Working at a toll booth for $100,000 per year
Interestingly, over half of the people posed with this question will choose architect, even though the financial incentive is lower. That uncovers what’s been missing from conventional views about motivation…
Conventional Views
Traditionally, there have been two views. The first view focused on basic motivations: People are motivated by fear, primal desires, etc. The second view, most common in businesses today, is of extrinsic motivation (incentives or “carrot and stick” motivators). The boss links rewards to doing what he wants done and links penalties to doing what he doesn’t want done. This ensures employees are motivated, right?.
While if-then motivators do work in many situations, there is more…
Monkeys, Puzzles, College Students, and Incentives
Consider a third view: The power of intrinsic motivation, the innate motivation from the work itself. In his book Drive, Daniel H. Pink compellingly argues that most companies miss the power of intrinsic motivation.
Conventional views say you shouldn’t want to do work unless you have an external reason to do it. But studies indicate otherwise. When puzzles are placed in the cages of lab monkeys, they solve the puzzles, in spite of there being no extrinsic reason.
The same is true of college students. In lab studies, they choose to solve problems without an external incentive. Equally interesting, after students are given incentives to solve a puzzle, they no longer solve subsequent puzzles unless incentives are offered again.
Understanding Intrinsic Motivation
People can be motivated by the intrinsic attributes of their work and jobs. As leaders, there are three factors to look for that strongly contribute to work being intrinsically motivating:
1. Autonomy: People want to have control over their work. They want to know what is theirs to do and have the freedom to determine how to do it.
2. Mastery: People want to get better at their work. They want to overcome challenges. They want to be better today than they were yesterday. They want to grow and improve.
3. Purpose: People want to be part of something bigger than they are. They want to contribute to something larger than themselves.
Being Creative
Google creatively taps intrinsic motivation: They offer “20% time” where employees are free to invest one day per week on any project they feel is valuable.
Similarly, an Australian software company Atlassian holds a quarterly “FedEx day” where each employee can collaborate with others on any project they feel is important. They invest the day (and often much of the night) accomplishing their project. It’s called a FedEx day because they have to deliver something overnight: The following day, each team presents what they produced.
Risk of Extrinsics
Intrinsic motivation brings traditional tools into question. For example, if-then incentives are helpful only for certain “algorithmic” tasks. There are two types of tasks: algorithmic and heuristic. Algorithmic means a logical sequence of steps or rules for solving a problem, while heuristic means a process of thinking and arriving at a solution through experience, trial and error, or creativity, rather than a set of rules.
Incentives do speed productivity in algorithmic work, but they often slow results in heuristic work. This is because incentives make you focus in on the specific task and speed up, which is the opposite of what’s needed to prompt out-of-the-box thinking and creative problem solving.
We must take these task types into account when considering incentives. When we want to encourage creativity and an openness to change and grow, we need to highlight and promote the intrinsic motivation of a task or position by providing employees the opportunity to achieve autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose within that role.
Here are tips that help promote (and not derail) intrinsic motivation:
- Separate “if-then” motivators: For example, if you give your child an allowance for being part of the family, also give your child chores for being a part of the family. Don’t give your child an allowance if he does his chores. If you do, he will expect to get paid every time you ask him to do something.
- Catalyze creativity: Don’t offer incentives for the person who can devise the most creative marketing piece. Do offer pizza if the team can stuff all of the mailers by 3pm.
Remember, 74% of employees are disengaged clock watchers. You can help change that by tapping intrinsic motivation.