Nine Ways to Improve Motivation in Your Organization

In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink describes methods that can help organizations to foster motivation in their employees. The goal is to encourage "Type I" behavior, which is an approach to life built around intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators.  It focusses on our innate need to direct our own own lives, to design and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and the world.

Nine Ways to Improve your Company, Office, or Group

1. "Try 20 percent time with training wheels".  Based on Google's 20% time in which employees are given the freedom to work on any project they want, this could mean 10% of an employee's time, one afternoon per week, was spent working on great but untried ideas.  Even done for a short period such as six months, this will allow people to convert their down time into productive time.
 
2. "Encourage peer-to-peer 'now that' rewards".  Giving employees the responsibility for giving their colleagues $50 bonuses when they do something exceptional carries a deeper meaning than a bonus from management months after the fact. And it is motivating.
 
3. "Conduct an autonomy audit". Find out through anonymous survey how much autonomy the people in your department believe that they have for task, technique, and team. Compare what employees perceive as their autonomy with what management thinks. Do these perceptions match?
 
4. "Take four steps towards giving up control". 
• Involve people in goal setting -  research shows that when people have a hand in setting their own goals, they are more committed.
• Use non-controlling language. Replacing "must" or "should" with "consider" or "think about" can help promote engagement over compliance.
• Hold office hours. This allows employees the freedom to approach you with questions or ideas in a less stressful setting than being summoned. 
• Develop a workplace Wiki where employees can kick around ideas informally until they are  ready to be formally presented.
5. "Play 'whose purpose is it anyway?'" Gather your employees and ask them to write your company's purpose on a 3 x 5 card.  Collect them and read them aloud.  Are they all in agreement, or all different? People should know the goal of what they are doing. Not knowing the purpose of your work can be unmotivating.
 
6. "Use Reich's pronoun test". Robert Reich came up with a powerful and free tool for measuring employee engagement.  Talk to employees, and listen tt how they refer to the company.  Is it "we" or "they"? "We" can achieve mastery, autonomy, and purpose, but "they" can't.
 
7. "Design for intrinsic motivation". Online forums and websites are often explicitly designed to tap intrinsic motivation. They:
   
   
   
   • Create a positive environment that makes people feel good about participating.
   • Give users autonomy.
   • Keep the system as open as possible.
   What matters in cyberspace also matters in physical space. Make sure your environment promotes autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
 
8. "Promote Goldilocks for groups".
   
   
   
   • Begin with a team that is diverse in terms of background and training, so that they are all strong in different areas, and they can cross-fertilize each other's ideas.
   • Make your group a no-competition zone; replace competition with collaboration or cooperetion.
   • Try a little task shifting. If a member of your team has mastered his assigned tasks, and is ready for something new, have him train someone else in the skills he's mastered, and then let him take on some aspect of a more experienced team member's work. This will keep work fresh and challenging for everyone.
   • Animate with purpose, don't motivate with rewards. The more that a team shares a common cause, the more deeply satisfying and outstanding the work will be.
 
9. "Turn your next off-site into a FedEx Day". Off-site meetings can be soul-sapping demotivating experiences. FEdEx Days, developed by Atlassian, and Australian software company, are days where employees put side their regular work, and focus on delivering a product, process, method, or other idea in that could benefit the company in 24 hours. This taps employees Motivation 3.0 creativity, and refreshes them to tackle their everyday work anew. 

Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books. 2009.

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