The Idea in Brief
Imagine your workforce so motivated that employees relish more hours of work, not fewer, initiate increased responsibility themselves, and boast about their challenging work, not their paychecks or bonuses.
An impossible dream? Not if you understand the counterintuitive force behind motivation—and the ineffectiveness of most performance incentives. Despite media attention to the contrary, motivation does not come from perks, plush offices, or even promotions or pay. These extrinsic incentives may stimulate people to put their noses to the grindstone—but they’ll likely perform only as long as it takes to get that next raise or promotion.
The truth? You and your organization have only limited power to motivate employees. Yes, unfair salaries may damage morale. But when you do offer fat paychecks and other extrinsic incentives, people won’t necessarily work harder or smarter.
Why? Most of us are motivated by intrinsic rewards: interesting, challenging work, and the opportunity to achieve and grow into greater responsibility.
Of course, you have to provide some extrinsic incentives. After all, few of us can afford to work for no salary. But the real key to motivating your employees is enabling them to activate their own internal generators. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck trying to recharge their batteries yourself—again and again.
The Idea in Practice
How do you help employees charge themselves up? Enrich their jobs by applying these principles:
- Increase individuals’ accountability for their work by removing some controls.
- Give people responsibility for a complete process or unit of work.
- Make information available directly to employees rather than sending it through their managers first.
- Enable people to take on new, more difficult tasks they haven’t handled before.
- Assign individuals specialized tasks that allow them to become experts.
The payoff? Employees gain an enhanced sense of responsibility and achievement, along with new opportunities to learn and grow—continually. Example:
A large firm began enriching stockholder correspondents’ jobs by appointing subject-matter experts within each unit—then encouraging other unit members to consult with them before seeking supervisory help. It also held correspondents personally responsible for their communications’ quality and quantity. Supervisors who had proofread and signed all letters now checked only 10% of them. And rather than harping on production quotas, supervisors no longer discussed daily quantities.
These deceptively modest changes paid big dividends: Within six months, the correspondents’ motivation soared—as measured by their answers to questions such as “How many opportunities do you feel you have in your job for making worthwhile contributions?” Equally valuable, their performance noticeably improved, as measured by their communications’ quality and accuracy, and their speed of response to stockholders.
Job enrichment isn’t easy. Managers may initially fear that they’ll no longer be needed once their direct reports take on more responsibility. Employees will likely require time to master new tasks and challenges.
But managers will eventually rediscover their real functions, for example, developing staff rather than simply checking their work. And employees’ enthusiasm and commitment will ultimately rise—along with your company’s overall performance.
The psychology of motivation is tremendously complex, and what has been unraveled with any degree of assurance is small indeed. But the dismal ratio of knowledge to speculation has not dampened the enthusiasm for new forms of snake oil that are constantly coming on the market, many of them with academic testimonials. Doubtless this article will have no depressing impact on the market for snake oil, but since the ideas expressed in it have been tested in many corporations and other organizations, it will help—I hope—to redress the imbalance in the aforementioned ratio.
