I greatly enjoyed my time with
Dan Pink last week as we led a webinar on “What Drives Motivation and Recognition.” If you missed the webinar, you can
request a recording. Below I highlight key points from the webinar. Except where I’ve inserted my comments in italics, consider the below quotations from Dan on his insights in the webinar.
FACT: Money is a motivator, but the connection between compensation and satisfaction at work is more about fairness than about amount. If people feel like they aren’t being paid fairly or adequately to support families, then they will not be motivated. But once you pay people enough (or more than enough), then adding more money does not add more motivation. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table so they can focus on doing their work.
So what are the main motivators? There are three:
1) Autonomy: The urge to be self-directed and not controlled. Traditional notions of management, however, are about control and getting people to comply. Management is an outdated technology from the 1850s that hasn’t been updated that much and doesn’t work well in the 21st century. It’s great if you want compliance, but if you want true employee engagement, self-direction is the better path to engagement.
Get out of their way and let them do what they do best.
(Dan also offers examples of how companies do this today and suggestions for integrating the strategies into your organization.)
2) Mastery: Our desire to get better at stuff (e.g., why people practice musical instruments on the weekend). A recent
Harvard Business Review study found that the top motivator, far and away, was: “making progress in one’s work. The key to motivation doesn’t depend on elaborate incentives.”
FACT: Recognition matters. A lot. Because recognition acknowledges the progress people need, frequently catch people in the act of making progress, call it out so people notice it, share it more widely and formally, and celebrate it. This is so powerful because Mastery depends on feedback. This kind of Now/That recognition is a powerful form of feedback. If it’s non-contingent (not held out as a carrot), it’s very motivating to Mastery. A culture that recognizes and celebrates progress is enormously motivating, creating engaging and productive places to work. And this is where the work that
Globoforce is doing really comes into sync with the science.
3) Purpose: Increasing earnings per share 2 cents is not a rallying cry to get people out of bed in the morning. People want to do something big and something important. This is not a profit motive. This is a purpose motive. A profit motive can result in
unethical activities and poor productivity. If the purpose is just about maximizing shareholder return, it is not sufficiently motivating for people to do extraordinary things.
(Dan gives further interesting insight into how the Baby Boomers in particular are accelerating this push for purpose with “encore careers.”)
Be sure to listen through the Q&A at the end for Dan’s insights on the importance of peer-to-peer recognition as true Now/That rewards that are a great form of feedback, helping people move towards mastery and building teamwork. “Peer-to-peer brings a mass mobilization of the culture and is one of the most underused motivational techniques in the organization today.”
