Motivation in the 21st Century

How do you motivate your staff and yourself? If you are focused on rewards and outcomes you are ignoring well-established scientific fact. It’s like holding on to that horse and buggy because you just don’t belief that darned auto thingy works. Do you have the confidence to let go of the old way of doing things?

Studies conducted all over the world repeatedly demonstrate the following facts:
1 -Rewards as an incentive work for a very small number of tasks. These are tasks that are simple and have a clearly defined destination. In today’s world most of these tasks can either be automated or out-sourced.
2- Rewards as an incentive destroy creativity. One of the many studies on this topic took a group of MIT students and offered them financial bonuses to solve different sets of problems. The bonuses worked with problems that involved mechanical skills. When offered for problems that required cognitive skills, financial rewards led to poorer performance, and larger financial rewards led to worse performance. Yes you read that correctly, performance declined as the financial rewards grew.
3-For right-brained tasks motivation is increased when the individual likes what they’re doing, finds it interesting, feels that they are part of something bigger, and have autonomy. Google has taken this finding and run with it. Their employees work on whatever they want 20% of the time. Their most popular products, such as gmail and googlenews, have come out of this time. In fact, half of their new products come out of this totally autonomous time.


Another area in which we tend to operate contrary to scientific fact is in acknowledging performance. The fact is that highlighting the effort, the process, is much more effective then focusing only on outcome. This is not to say that outcome is not important, our course outcome is important. However, acknowledging effort is the most effective way to get optimal performance and desired outcomes. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. A belief in the importance of effort improves resilience, persistence, and gives people a greater sense of control over what they are doing. Therefore, they are intrinsically motivated to do a better job, and will be more successful.

These are solid research results that can bring your business or your work life into the 21st century. Think about how you might apply them.

Can you give your employees (or get for yourself) more autonomy? Some companies have given their employees total control of their own schedules, they work whenever they want to, and this has proven to have a positive effect on creativity and productivity. It also goes a long way towards attracting and retaining top performers.

Can you acknowledge effort as well as outcome, can you even go as far as acknowledging failure as a step on the way to success, as an opportunity to learn how to do better?

We are 9 years into a new century and have experienced a time of tremendous economic upheaval. Things are changed and won’t be the way they were before, so it’s a great time to explore new and more effective ways of working. Check it out.