Workplace Motivation

How do you motivate yourself and your staff? If you focus only on rewards and outcomes you are missing out. It’s like clinging to a horse and buggy because you just don’t believe that darned auto thingy works and has a future.

Studies conducted all over the world repeatedly demonstrate:
•Rewards as an incentive work for a very small number of tasks that are simple and have a clearly defined measure of success. Increasingly, these jobs can be either automated or out-sourced.
•Reward structure can destroy creativity. In one study, a group of MIT students was offered financial bonuses to solve different problems. The bonuses were effective with problems involving mechanical skills, but for those that required cognitive skills financial rewards led to poorer performance and larger financial rewards led to even worse performance. Yes, you read that correctly, performance declined as the financial rewards increased.
•For right-brained tasks, the more creative ones, motivation is increased when individuals like what they’re doing, find it interesting, feel 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 percent of the time. Their most popular products, such as Gmail and Googlenews, have been developed under that slice of work allocation. Google estimates that half of their new products come out of this totally autonomous time.

Another area in which we can operate in line with scientific findings is in acknowledging performance rather than just focusing on outcome. Highlighting effort and process is much more effective than looking only at results. This is not to say that outcome is not important, however, acknowledging effort is the most effective way to engender the optimal performance that leads to desired outcomes.
Belief in the importance of effort improves resilience, persistence, and grants people a greater sense of control over what they are doing. They are intrinsically motivated to do a better job and will be more successful.

These research results, if acted upon, can maximize the performance of your business or your work life in 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 to acknowledge failure as a step on the way to success and as an opportunity to learn how to do better?

We are over a decade into this century and have experienced a time of tremendous economic upheaval. Trite as it sounds, the only constant is change, so it’s a great time to explore new and more effective ways of working.