Energize Your Organization: Motivate Without Money
Encouraging Intrinsic Motivation – Learning From History
As the sheer scale of the economic crisis folds, consumers, employees and businesses are all reassessing their core values.
One of the biggest criticisms we’re hearing about the causes of this recession is the idea that businesses have become locked into short-termism, seeking to generate profits quickly, while casting aside long-term growth and vision.
Companies that will prosper and come out of the other side of the recession are the ones who cultivate a base of core customers and loyal employees.
The crisis is allowing some employers companies explore ways of motivating and energizing employees, who can be discouraged seeing co-workers losing their jobs and wondering if they are next in line. Financial incentives do have an effect on motivation, but it is locked into the old, short-term way of thinking.
Forward thinking leaders are taking the opportunity to change. They know that funds spent on employee morale and incentives now are sound investments for their future.
4 Myths About Motivation
1. You Can Motivate People: You cannot motivate anybody. A leader’s job is to create an environment where people can motivate themselves. Everybody has goals and ambitions. A good leader recognizes this and aims to help staff realize their goals and ambitions.
2. Fear Is A Good Motivator: Fear may be a temporary motivator, but ultimately ineffective. Using fear is a sign of weak management.
3. What Motivates Me Will Motivate Other People: You reached your position because you had your own goals and ambitions. Allowing other people to grow and take on new challenges is the key to motivation.
4. Money Is A Good Motivator: Money can motivate, but it must be used carefully and is generally only a short-term solution. Making sure that your staff have a living wage is one thing, but incentive related bonuses can have a very negative effect and can actually be, over time, demotivating.
Does Money Motivate People?
Studies have shown that, for people with comfortable salaries, non-financial incentives are far more powerful than cash bonuses for building long-term motivation.
A McKinsey Quarterly survey recently showed that non-financial motivators are critical in fostering motivation. Three non-financial motivators outperformed the leading financial motivators: Praise from line managers, leadership attention and the chance to head projects and task forces were far superior to cash bonuses, wage increases and stock options. Non-financial incentives show employees that the company values their input, cares about their wellbeing, and creates opportunities for career changes and growth.
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Talent/Motivating_people_Getting_beyond_money_2460?gp=1#footnote2>
“Generally, we are motivated by two different reasons. We either do some things for what we call extrinsic reasons. Namely, you work for forty hours a week so you can get a paycheck at the end. And you don’t really like the job much but you want the paycheck to do things with that you will enjoy. So that’s extrinsic because the reward comes after the activity from the outside.
Now, flow is a type of intrinsic motivation, that is, there you do what you’re doing primarily because you like what you’re doing. If you learn only for external, extrinsic reasons, you will probably forget it as soon as you are no longer forced to remember what you want to do. Nor will you be motivated to learn for its own sake. Whereas if you are intrinsically motivated, you’re going to keep learning as you move up and so you are in this lifelong learning mode, which would be the ideal.”
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D., psychologist and author of the book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
“Too many organizations… still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. They continue to pursue practices such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures usually don’t work and often do harm. Worse, these practices have infiltrated our schools, where we ply our future workforce with iPods, cash, and pizza coupons to “incentivize” them to learn. Something has gone wrong.”
Daniel Pink, former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, best selling author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, and Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
So How Do Leaders Encourage Employees And Improve Performance?
1. Don’t Demotivate: Know what the de-motivators are and avoid them.
2. Develop A Culture: Every organization should develop and communicate a unique identity and purpose. For example, everybody knows ‘The Google Way.’
3. Hire The Right People: Hire people aligned with your purpose.
4. Reinforce The Purpose: People want to believe in your company, but you need to give them reason. Be clear about your goals and transparent about how they will benefit your staff. Saying one thing and doing another is the most powerful de-motivator of all; employees will not forgive duplicity and doublespeak.
Putting it into Practice – Avoiding Demotivation
1. Ask, Not Tell: Ask your staff what will motivate them and try to make it happen. For example, an employee with children may prefer flexible hours, allowing them to attend school events, rather than receive higher pay.
2. Encourage Strengths: Every employee has hidden strengths, and encouraging these builds confidence and breeds motivation. Make sure that staff spend time with mentors, take training courses, and are given challenging assignments. Too many companies promise and then never deliver, a sure way to demotivate beyond repair.
3. Two Way Communication: Involve staff in making decisions that will affect them. Ask staff to help you find solutions to problems and encourage them to ask managers for guidance.
4. Appreciate and Praise: Praising staff in public builds motivation and also creates a positive impression. However, under no circumstances should you reprimand staff in public or in front of other staff. Keep negativity behind closed doors.
5. Create Teamwork: Promoting internal competition about co-workers is ultimately destructive.
6. Don’t Tolerate Poor Performance: Allowing poor performance from some is demotivating to the top performers.
7. Less Rules and Policies: Creating a lot of rules and policies for people to follow demotivates and discourages initiative.
8. Meetings Must Be Purposeful: If you must have meetings, make sure they start on time, have a clear agenda, and identified goals and action plans at the end. No one wants to spend time in unproductive meetings.
9. Develop Clear Expections: Clear performance goals are motivating; unclear goals and unclear expectations are very demotivating.
Dan Pink Goes Back To Basics
Dan Pink, in his latest book, Drive, challenges some of the widely held myths and assumptions about motivation.
Pink show us that we need to change our thinking about human motivation, as many of our ideas about motivation are out-dated and contrary to what works.
He expertly summarizes the latest findings in behavioral research but, crucially, also points out that most of the findings are nothing new. Managers, teachers, and parents have forgotten how to motivate, and rarely understand that motivation is elegant in its simplicity.
Pink starts by dividing people into two types, Intrinsically motivated and extrinsically motivated people, which he labels ‘Type I’ and ‘Type X.’ Understanding the difference is the key to motivation and coaxing higher levels of performance from employees. Crucially, intrinsic motivation can be taught, and a few simple adjustments to a business culture can achieve results.
Dan Pink, in an interview with TIME magazine, offered some tips for converting people from externally motivated Type X’s, into internally driven Type I’s. Internal motivation, he says, breeds better performance and encourages long-term well-being and satisfaction. A far-sighted business leader understands that workers want greater autonomy and taps into their ‘Innate capacity for self-direction.’
Practical Ways Businesses Can Improve Performance
Pink starts by tearing apart the idea of performance reviews, pointing out that they are sporadic and of little practical use. Encouraging people to assess their own performance is far preferable. He also offers nine tips for leadership, in going back to basics and fostering a unique (and successful) business culture.
1. Look For The 20%: Google gives staff 20% of their time to allocate to personal projects, about anything they wish. If this is too scary, try 10% or one afternoon per week, giving staff free rein to generate and develop their own ideas.
2. Encourage “Peer To Peer Rewards”: An internal reward system allows employees to recommend colleagues for going beyond the call of duty. Recognition amongst peers is uplifting and prevents quieter members of staff, who are often never noticed by managers, from feeling under appreciated.
3. Conduct An Autonomy Survey: Ask staff to fill out an anonymous survey, designed to find out how much autonomy they perceive that they have. Adjust your practices accordingly.
4. 3 Steps To Giving Up Control: Consistently, micromanagement is highlighted as one of the biggest demotivators. To avoid this, involve employees in goal setting. Think about your language and use ‘consider’ or ‘think about,’ instead of ‘should’ or ‘must.’ Set aside time, in office hours, for your employees to stop by – and talk openly.
5. Whose Purpose Is It Anyway? Gather your team and ask them to write down the organization’s purpose on a blank card. If most employees prove to be unaware of the purpose, the buck stops with you. Develop a mission and communicate it continually to every level of the organization.
6. Reich’s Pronoun Test: Do your employees refer to the company as ‘They’ or as ‘We.’ If the answer is ‘They,’ you need to foster a more inclusive environment.
7. Design For Intrinsic Motivation: Redesign your organizational structure to allow autonomy, personal development, and purpose.
8. Promote Goldilocks For Groups: To promote teamwork, create diverse teams, discourage competition, shift tasks evenly around the team, and use purpose to motivate intrinsically, rather than rely upon external incentives.
9. Turn Your Next Offsite Into A FedEx Day: Many businesses still use team-building exercises and forced ‘fun days’ to build morale. Unless the event is done very well, or involves some type of community service (a growing trend in team building events), the reality is that many employees will find them patronizing. Try giving people a day off to follow their own pursuits, on the condition that they bring a fresh idea back to the office.
“Real challenges are far more invigorating than forced leisure.” – Daniel Pink