Recommendation
In this educational video, motivational expert Daniel Pink explores what inspires people to perform well at work. Surprisingly, throwing cash at employees often inhibits performance rather than enhancing it. People do their best work when they are mastering their own time, utilising and improving their skills, or contributing to a greater ideal. The presentation does have illustrative examples, but how you implement those useful bits of knowledge in your company remains up to you. getAbstract recommends this compulsively watchable video to anyone who needs to motivate others in the workplace.
Take-Aways
- Large rewards can work as incentives, but only when the labour is mechanical and basic.
- Repeated studies show that offering monetary rewards does not boost performance.
- Workers are more productive when they are masters of their own time.
- People want to learn new skills and take on new challenges.
- The most powerful motivator is feeling that your work contributes to the greater good.
Summary
Rewarding good behaviour should enhance performance. When behavioural scientists ran a study at MIT to confirm this belief, they met with surprising results. They asked students to complete a variety of tasks, some mental, such as puzzles, and some physical, such as throwing a ball through a hoop. The scientists rewarded the top performers. They found that in the mechanical tasks, the reward incentive worked: The higher the reward, the better the performance. But once participants performed tasks demanding even a small amount of “cognitive skill,” the incentives had no effect.
“We are not as endlessly manipulable and predictable as you would think.”
Thinking that perhaps a monetary reward was not a sufficient enticement for MIT students, the testers repeated the study in rural India, offering the equivalent of two months’ salary to top performers. Again, big rewards did not produce better results. In fact, rewards actually weakened performance. These results are contrary to the reward/performance tenet taught in economics classes. Yet scientists from various fields, including economics, psychology and sociology, have duplicated these results in test after test.
“Management is great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement…, self-direction is better.”
Paying people handsomely does not result in exceptional performance. Companies need to pay their employees only enough so that salary is no longer a top-of-mind concern. The three motivators that drive people to do their best at work are “autonomy, mastery, and purpose.” Companies that give their professionals a freer rein enjoy higher levels of engagement. For example, Atlassian, a software firm in Australia, allows developers to work on any project of their choosing for one day each quarter. The self-directed work produced new products, fixed problems, and generated inspirational ideas.
“We are purpose maximizers, not only profit maximizers.”
Many people seek fun and mastery in their free time, by, for example, learning a musical instrument. Highly skilled developers who collaborate without pay to create open-source code do so to hone their craft. People also want to contribute to a higher ideal. When employees believe that the only purpose of their labor is to increase company profits, “bad things happen,” such as poor service, low-quality products, and even illegal activity. Staffers who believe in the purpose of their work do great things. Recognising what motivates people is the best way to build a successful organisation.
About the Speaker
Daniel Pink is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Whole New Mind.
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