Are you finding that monetary rewards are just not enough to get your employees to produce high quality material? Do you need to push your employees to get them to do what you want? How can you change their mindset?

For so long companies have been largely organized on the standard rewards and punishment system that fosters an environment of extrinsic motivation. However, over the past several years, there has been an increase in demand for heuristic jobs (process is found through learning and discovery) over algorithmic jobs (process is simple and pre-determined). Heuristic jobs demand much more thought and creativity than algorithmic jobs.  Monetary rewards may not be enough of a motivation to encourage an employee to produce high quality work in a heuristic job. So how can an organization adapt to create an environment that fosters, not just extrinsic motivation, but also intrinsic motivation?

Follow these steps (adapted from Daniel Pink’s Drive) to increase performance and satisfaction:

Implement autonomy (the desire to direct our own lives) into the following 4 elements in order to increase engagement over compliance:

Task – the thing your employees actually do

Time – encourage a results-only work environment in which what gets completed is more important than how long it takes to complete

Technique – allow your employees to complete the task how they want to

Team – give your employees the ability to choose who they want to work with

Encourage mastery (the urge to get better and better at something that matters) by ensuring your employees understand the following:

Mindset – what is the best attitude needed to achieve success?

Pain – it takes a lot of hard work and effort to reach the end goal

Asymptote (a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it ever) – you might never quite reach mastery, but you can get very close

Create a purpose (the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves) for your employees

 

For more in depth information on intrinsic motivation in the workplace, please reach out to our team at Invista Performance Solutions.

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