The New Age of Motivation
22 Nov 2010It was once said that the world was round, and people laughed. It was also said that the Internet would never gain wide acceptance, and look at us now. New scientific findings will now challenge what you thought you knew about motivation.
In 1970, British Scientologist Richard Titmus made the bold statement that if Britain incentivised people to give blood, this would result in a reduction in supply’s. Many people laughed and it was never trialled, in Britain that is. But a quarter of a century later they did in Sweden and the results were incredible. By offering the public a financial incentive to give blood, donations dropped by 22%.
A behavioural scientist called Edward Deci carried out a study to establish how external rewards affected children while drawing pictures. He split them into 3 groups, Group A was offered a reward in the way of a certificate, Group B an unexpected reward on completion of the task, and Group C would receive no reward. The three groups were asked to draw, and on completion Group A received their expected reward and Group B received their unexpected reward.
Two weeks later they held a free play time for the children with drawing equipment and materials supplied. When left alone, Groups B & C drew just as much, but group A showed much less interest. The incentive had turned play into work, and what they call the “Sawyer effect” had taken place. This is what happens in most of our organisations today, we offer financial incentives with the best of intentions but this is destroying our innate desire to perform the task.
Numerous other experiments have taken place with the same conclusion - that external rewards can seriously affect intrinsic motivation and therefore result in poor performance. Economist Dan Ariely, conducted a particularly memorable experiment in India so he could pay his participants substantial rewards without breaking the bank. He split the 87 participants into three groups and if they attained a certain performance level they would receive the reward.
Group 1 participants would receive one day’s pay, Group 2 would receive two weeks’ pay, and Group 3 would receive five months’ pay. Groups 1 & 2 performed the same but group 3 fared worse on 8 of the 9 tasks. Their conclusion was “higher incentives lead to worse performance.” This experiment shows how incentives can dull creativity and focus people’s mind on the reward and not the job in hand. Essentially, it narrows our focus.
In 2009, the London School of economics analysed 51 corporate pay-for-performance plans. The economists’ conclusion was, “we find that financial incentives… can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”
All this evidence to show that incentivising doesn’t work begs the question of what does. Firstly you have to take the issue of money off the table, paying your people a good salary is essential. If they can find other employment doing the same work for more money then you have not taken the problem away.
Presuming you have successfully structured your employees’ packages, one example that organisations internationally have successfully implemented is called ROWE – Results Only Work Environment. In a ROWE work environment people can do what they want, when they want. There is no nine-to-five schedule, as people approach working hours with flexibility in order to deliver results. People have total autonomy over their work and observed results indicate that productivity rises, stress levels diminish, and staff turnover is almost eliminated.
An Australian company Atlassian introduced events called FedEx days which is another great example of what drives intrinsic motivation. This is when employees once a quarter, have 24 hours to work on a software problem, even if it’s not connected to their jobs. They then have to present their work back to the organisation. People work through the night to complete this task for no extra pay. The results for igniting intrinsic motivation were so successful they decided to ask employees to use this time to work on something not connected to their jobs. This gave people further intrinsic motivation and autonomy over the 4 T’s: task, time, technique and team.
Now Atlassian have transformed these FedEx day’s into a concept Google gave birth to, 20% time. That’s when employees can spend one day a week working on anything they like, even if it’s not connected to their everyday jobs. Google and Atlassian have both admitted, “Some of our most successful products are produced in 20% time.”
Leaders of tomorrow need to understand that management isn’t about checking whether people are in their offices and calling on customers. It’s about creating the perfect working environment for people to produce outstanding results.
Now it’s clear from this, and much more scientific research, that incentives can dull creativity and performance. What we know is incentives can be effective, but only in a very small band of circumstances. People have an intrinsic desire to work, but we continue to force motivate people with external rewards.
We are working tirelessly with organisations to implement exciting new leadership strategies just like the examples above. These are igniting peoples innate desire for work and giving them complete autonomy, mastery and purpose over their jobs. People need to experience a paradigm shift in order to adopt a new mentality. The sooner people do, the sooner they can implement operational changes that will unleash the human potential of their organisation.
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