From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
For simple, straightforward tasks, those kinds of incentives - if you give this, then you get that - they're great! They algorithmic, set of rules where you have to just follow along and get the right answer - if then a reward, carrots and sticks - outstanding.
But when a task gets more complicated, when it requires some conceptual, creating thinking, those kinds of motivators demonstrably don't work.
Fact - money is a motivator at work, but in a slightly strange way - if you don't pay people enough - they won't be motivated.
What's curious about this - is another paradox here - which is at the best use of money as a motivator is - pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough, so that they are not thinking about money and they are thinking about the work.
Once you do that it turns to 3 factors that the science shows leads to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction:
Autonomy
Mastery and
Purpose
Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed - we want to direct our own lives. In many ways traditional notions of management run a foul of that.
Management is great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, as people are doing more complicated and sophisticated things - self-direction is better.
Let me give you some examples of this - almost radical forms of self-direction in the work place that lead to good results. Let's start with this company right here - ATLASSIAN - an Australian company, a software company, they do something really cool. Once a quarter on Thursday afternoon, they say to their developers: "Next 24 hours you can work on anything you want. You can work on it the way you want, you can work on it with whoever you want, all we ask is that you show the results to the company at the end of those 24 hours". This is done in a fun kind of meeting, not a Star Chamber session, but that kind of fun meeting with cake and beer and fun and other things like that. It turned out that one day of pure undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software, whole array of ideas for new products that otherwise wouldn't have ever emerged - one day.
This is not "if then" incentive, this is not sort of thing I would've done 3 years ago before I knew this research. I would've said: "you want people to be creative and innovative - give them a freaking innovation bonus a - if you do something cool, I'll give you 25 hundred dollars."
They're not doing this at all - they're essentially saying: "You probably want to do something interesting, let me just get out of your way".
One day of autonomy produces things that never emerged.
So let's talk about mastery. Mastery is the urge to get better at stuff - we like to get better at stuff, this is why people play music instruments on the weekends. You get all these people who are acting in ways that seem irrational economically. They're playing music instruments on weekends, why? It's not going to get them a mate (не понял здесь слово), it's not going to make them any money, why are they doing that? Because it's fun, because you get better at it, and that's satisfying.
Go back in time a little bit, imaging, I imagine this if I went to my first economics professor, a women named Mary Alex Schulman, and I went to her at 1983, and said: "Professor, can I talk to you after class for a moment? Just I got this incline, I got this idea for a business model, I just want to run it pass to you. And that's how it would work: You get a bunch of people from round the world, who're doing highly skilled work, but they're willing to do it for free, and volunteer their time - 20, sometimes 30 hours per week. (ok, she's looking somewhat skeptically there, but I'm not done). And then what they create, they give it away, rather than sell it! - it's gonna be huge!". She truly would've thought that I was insane! But is seems to fly in a face of so many things, what do you have? You have Linux, powering 1 out of 4 corporate servers in 4 out of 5 hundred companies, Apache, powering more than a majority of web servers, Wikipedia. What's going on, why are people doing this? Why are all of these people, who are technically sophisticated, highly skilled people, who have jobs. Ok, they have jobs! They're working at jobs for pay, doing challenging, sophisticated technical work, and yet, during their limited discretionary time they do equally if not more technically sophisticated work, not for their employer, but for someone else for free!
That's a strange economic behavior, economists look into this: "Why are they doing this?" It's overwhelmingly clear - challenge and mastery along with making contribution - that's it!
What you see more and more is what you may call a purpose mode of. As more and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent purpose. Partly because it makes coming to work better, partly because that's the way to get better talents.
An what we're seeing now, that when profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen, bad things ethically sometimes. But also bad this which are just not good stuff, like crappy products, like lame services, like uninspiring places to work, when the profit motive is paramount, or it becomes completely unhitched from the purpose motive, it's just people don't do great things.
More and more organizations are realizing this and it sort of disturbing the categories when what's profit and what's purpose. And I think that actually (не понял слово =) что-то в роде "helps") something interesting, and I think that the companies that organization are flourishing, whether they are profit, for profit or something in between are animated by this purpose.
Let me give you a couple of examples - here's the founder of Skype, he says: "Our goal is to be destructive, but in the cause of making the world a better place" - pretty good purpose. Steve Jobs: "I want to put a ding in the universe". All right, that the kind of thing, that might get you up in the morning, raising to go to work. I think that we are purpose maximisers not only profit maximisers.
I think the science shows that we care about mastery very very deeply and the science shows that we want to be self-directed.
And I think that the big take-away here is that if we start treating people like people, and not assuming that they are simply horses, you know, slower, smaller, better smelling horses. If we get past this ideology of carrots and sticks and look at the science, I think we can actually build organizations and work lives that make us better off, also think to promise to make our world just a little bit better.
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