What You Need to Know About Motivation in the Workplace

Most leaders want motivated employees. Motivated employees maintain higher morale, performance, and productivity. But what if your employee motivation program had the opposite effect on productivity?

By better understanding workplace motivation, you can dramatically improve the programs you implement to drive motivation and engagement.

The right way to motivate employees

If you want your employees to go above and beyond, whether that's closing more deals or completing an important project outside of their current job scope, it's common to offer a bonus or some other reward in return for those outcomes. That can work for uncomplicated rote tasks, but it has the unfortunate potential to punish employees for doing great work that doesn't fit that description.

Although your rewards program may not feature a formal "punishment" component, there's a chance you'll uncover some unintentional punishments within it if you look closely.

For example, if you only reward your salespeople for exceeding a predefined sales quota, someone who went above and beyond to solve a customer's problem may feel underappreciated, despite her heroic efforts. That employee might be passed over for a promotion, might not get a raise at their next performance review, or even lose your job due to her 'poor' performance.

It's important to understand what motivates employees, what de-motivates them, and where your employee motivation program fits in.

What are the right ways to motivate your remote team? Check out these 10 easy ways to keep remote employees happy and engaged. 

Two types of motivators

Motivators fall into two general categories: extrinsic and intrinsic.

Extrinsic motivation is defined as "not part of the essential nature of someone or something; coming or operating from outside."

External factors like tangible rewards or managerial pressure are examples of extrinsic motivators in the workplace. Extrinsic motivation isn't sufficient to motivate employees alone, because external factors have a variable meaning amongst different people.

Intrinsic motivation is defined as "belonging naturally; essential."

Intrinsic motivation comes from within. Someone who is intrinsically motivated performs an action or behavior because he or she enjoys it, or feels internally compelled to. Videos like these are designed to inspire intrinsic motivation.

Imagine two administrative assistants: Chris, who loves the written word, and Pat, who dislikes writing. Chris would likely be intrinsically motivated to write the company newsletter each month but Pat wouldn't be. If you incentivized the writing, Pat might respond if the reward were worth it, but then again, might not.

The key to effective motivation in the workplace is understanding the different types of motivation, and how they work in practice.

Simple extrinsic motivators are often problematic

In his TedTalk, The Puzzle of Motivation, Dan Pink discussed two studies that found that financial incentives can have a negative effect on performance.

In one study by Dan Ariely, MIT students were offered small, medium, and large rewards for performing various tasks. The study found rewarding the subjects for simple mechanical tasks worked as expected. However, once tasks involve cognitive skills, larger rewards resulted in poorer performance.

This study was repeated elsewhere with consistent results: those offered medium rewards performed about the same as those offered low rewards while those offered the highest rewards performed the worst of all.

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What is most effective

Intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery, and purpose can have a massive impact on overall motivation in the workplace.

Autonomy is the right or condition of self-government, or as Pink says, "the urge to direct our own lives."

Mastery is the deep understanding and skillful application of something that's important to us.

Purpose is our "reason for being." People want to be a part of something larger and meaningful.

So, if extrinsic motivation has a potentially negative impact on creative thinking, performance, and intrinsic motivation yields positive rewards for both the company and its employees, it makes sense to examine your motivation programs, and replace unsophisticated carrot-and-stick techniques in favor of initiatives that also foster a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

The takeaway

If you're looking for an easy and balanced way to support employee motivation, peer-to-peer recognition is a great way to do that, because it naturally balances intrinsic and extrinsic motivators for excellent results.