What Really Motivates Employees?

The other day a colleague here at M. Lee Smith Publishers suggested I take a look at a video that’s posted on YouTube. The video he wanted me to see was an animation adapted from a speech given by author Daniel Pink. The title of the video was the same as Mr. Pink’s latest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Hmm, someone’s sending a message to the boss.

I must say that I found the video to be very enlightening.

I know you’re dying to find out what really motivates us. According to the studies on which Pink based his work, when it comes to knowledge workers it’s NOT financial rewards. He makes the case that people are not as easily manipulated or predictable as many people think.

Much of the talk that serves as the basis for this video centers on two studies that call into question the theory that if you reward something you’ll get more of that behavior and if you punish something you’ll get less of that behavior.

The first study, funded by the Federal Reserve Bank and conducted by economists at MIT, the University of Chicago, and Carnegie Mellon, found that as long as the tasks required only mechanical skill, the financial rewards worked as expected — the higher the reward the better the performance. But if the task required cognitive skill, the larger reward led to poorer performance.

According to Pink, the Federal Reserve Bank was so surprised by the results of the study that they decided to test it again. They replicated the study in India. And the results were the same. In fact, study after study has replicated these results.

For simple, straight-forward tasks, financial rewards work. As Pink puts it, financial incentives work if you can say, “If you do this, you will get that.” But when a task becomes more complicated and requires conceptual, creative thinking, financial rewards don’t work.

So what does Pink say about money as a motivator at work when it comes to knowledge workers? He admits that money can be a motivator, but only in this way. “If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. Pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough that they’re not thinking about the money and they are thinking about the work.”

Now you’re thinking, “Is this really true?”

So what is it that does really motivate us? Pink says, according to all the behavioral studies, there are three factors that the science shows leads to better performance and personal satisfaction at work:

Autonomy. The first factor is autonomy — our desire to be self-directed. Pink admits that this goes against traditional management theory. In his talk, he says, “Management is great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement . . . self-directed is better.” Now that one rings true.

And Pink gives the example of an Australian software company, Atlassian. Once each quarter, Atlassian allows its developers to work on whatever they want for 24 hours. They can work on what they want, with whom they want, in any way they want. All they have to do is share the results of what they did to the company at the end of the day in a fun meeting with food, etc. This one day of autonomy per quarter has led to a whole host of software fixes and new product ideas that otherwise would have never emerged. According to Pink, the company is in essence saying, “You probably want to do something interesting, let me just get out of your way.”

Trusting your employees and letting them exercise their creative muscle — an interesting concept.

Mastery. The second thing that motivates knowledge workers is mastery. In the end, people just want to get better at what they do. People like to be good at their job and get better at it because it’s satisfying to get better at things.

Here Pink uses the example of open-source software such as Linux and Apache. Imagine that you can get a bunch of people willing to work for free to create something to give away. You have technically sophisticated people who are highly skilled and have jobs, but they’re willing to work for free on these projects because it offers them a challenge, a chance at mastery, and the opportunity to make a contribution. Our desire to get better at things!

Purpose. The third motivator for knowledge workers is purpose. According to Pink, more and more companies are looking to have a “transcendent purpose” because it makes coming to work better and helps recruit better talent. He says, “When you separate the ‘profit motive’ from the ‘purpose motive,’ bad things happen like crappy products and bad service.”

If you only focus on profit and forget about purpose, it doesn’t work. To really engage your workers, you need to show them the higher purpose of their work and the company’s. Let them know how they are helping people and making the world a better place, and they’ll do great things.

Pink’s bottom line: “If we start treating people like people — if we get past this ideology of carrots and sticks — we can actually build organizations and work lives that make us better off and make the world a little bit better.” Not a bad idea.

See the video