How To Motivate People At Work

Whether you are trying to motivate a workforce or even friends and family to help you with any kind of task , motivation has two aspects to it that determine whether someone is motivated from within, or whether they are motivated by something outside of themselves. These two kinds of motivators are called intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and when you strip away the fancy words and the long winded explanations that people have for these words, you are left with this:

Intrinsic - Motivated by reasons within themselves

Extrinsic - Motivated by financial rewards or other kinds of tangible incentives

The problem that many businesses have is that they are still applying principles of how to motivate people at work, which just don't work in the 21st century, the business world isn't as straight forward anymore and tasks are no longer "mechanical", they are far more complex requiring more cognitive skills and creativity. Computer systems are completing many of the mundane tasks that are required to be completed and we are left with more time to think outside the box so to speak and improve upon business systems, methods of operations etc. Managers and business owners are still applying traditional methods of rewards to motivate employees and this just doesn't work in anymore, let me explain.

How To Motivate People At Work - Social Studies

There is a complete mismatch of what science knows and what business does. Some years ago now a scientist named Sam Glucksberg ran a social experiment to identify the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators on work performance and to cut a long experiment short, the results were astonishing. Glucksberg realised that the effectiveness of traditional rewards (extrinsic motivation) was only positive when the task assigned was a mechanical and fairly straight forward. When there was a goal in sight and very little stood in the way, this kind of motivational system in place work incredibly well, boosting performance levels by a huge amount when two groups of people were assigned this straight forward task. The group that were rewarded intrinsically did not perform as well in fact, there was a 3 minute difference in the time elapsed to complete the same task.

So after the initial findings, Glucksberg decided to change the experiment and began to look at the effect of these types of motivation when the groups were assigned a similar task, however this time it required a degree of cognitive skill. The groups had to "think outside the box" slightly in order to get the task completed. Again the results of this experiment completely defied all traditional business thinking. The group who were intrinsically motivated, in other words they were motivated from within to complete the task, absolutely smashed the other group with the end results.

Rewards narrow the mind, increasing the focus on getting a very specific task completed, however in today's business world as I have mentioned, we are required to look on the peripheral, what do I mean by this? Well nothing is simple anymore, creativity and unorthodox ideas are often required to get over obstacles and problems.

So I ask you this, if increased bonuses and rewards at work do not increase productivity, then how are you going to motivate those you work with and those who work for you? How are you going to motivate them on an intrinsic level? To do things because they like to because they want to and because they are part of something important. This is the key in learning how to motivate people at work.