Motivation

19 June 2010

Companies constantly face the question, what makes employees work and work well? Love for the work, money, career development or opportunities for personal growth? Like any issue involving human nature, the answers are complex.

A friend of mine who works for one of Krakow's many outsourcing companies, doing accounting administrative work, was recently taken to task about her apparent lack of motivation at work. She was unhappy about this and pointed out that she did all her tasks to a satisfactory standard, but beyond that she probably didn't appear that happy because firstly, she wasn't that well paid and secondly, no new interesting or challenging projects were available for her to take on. In one of those delightful corporate Catch-22 situations, she would be much more motivated in her existing job, if she felt it would allow her to develop her skills, career and pay in the future, but management just wanted her to keep doing her current tasks at the current pay, and so avoided offering her ways to move up. As a result she was less motivated, management complains, the downward cycle continues.

About a month ago I watched an online lecture on this subject by Career analyst Dan Pink. In short he shows based on research, that if tasks are simple and mechanical, a straightforward relationship between higher pay and better performance exists. However as soon as tasks involve even a small amount of thinking, this 'carrot and stick' approach breaks down, more money can actually produce a poorer performance. In this type of work, he suggests, you should pay people enough so that the issue of money is off the table, after that 3 factors lead to better performance:

• Self-direction: Having control over the projects you take on and the freedom to be creative.
• Mastery: The desire to improve and learn new skills.
• Purpose: A reason for doing something beyond profit.

He points to Linux and Wikipedia, as examples where intelligent qualified people are highly motivated to contribute to great products, but work for free.

I discussed this in my office with my team and after everyone had finished asking for raises, I got some interesting reactions.

One person pointed out that the above approach would probably work perfectly in the IT world, with its altruistic software developers with ideas of changing the world through technology. However for most 'traditional' occupations such as finance, real estate, law, administration, money was still the primary and most effective motivator. He pointed out that while these occupations are 'thinking' jobs, the ability to substantially change the way the work is performed is limited and so bonuses play an important part in rewarding and differentiating those who do the work better than others. He also suggested that less people 'love' the work involved in these types of jobs, but do find the lifestyles, safety and financial potential they bring, very rewarding.

Another person pointed to the example of a previous employer who had tried to adopt the approach of paying enough to take the issue off the table. With some people it had the desired effect and produced motivated creative workers. Many others however simply didn't get it. They interpreted the higher than average pay as a sign of stupidity on behalf of the employer, who obviously didn't understand what a person in that job should be paid. As a result these workers did just enough to keep their 'overpaid' jobs and hoped to push for further raises.

I suppose like most people my own case falls somewhere in between. I started my career working at Citigroup as an investment banker. We were well trained, the pay was great and there were plenty of opportunities for career development. However working in a large organization with all it's slow moving processes and fixed business lines left me feeling stifled. Moving to a start-up company and later setting up my own business gave me everything Dan Pink talks about, creativity, autonomy and I'm learning every day (Working in the Polish language guarantees that). In short, I'm motivated.