119. How do I motivate employees at work?

Transcript – Episode 119: How do I motivate employees at work?

Joe: The answer to the question, how do I motivate employees at work? Is really just two words. [Music]

Joe: Welcome to Boss Better Now, the show that teaches leaders and business owners how to activate employee commitment in today’s everchanging workplace. And believe it or not, the question that I have been asked the most over my 20-year career teaching leaders how to create the conditions at work that lead employees to join and stay and care and try is this question. How do I motivate employees at work? How do I get people here to care and try and give it all they’ve got? And when you dive into the psychology of motivation, when you do a deep dive to understand what leads people to part with effort and try and care, what you learn very quickly is this. The answer to the question, how do I motivate employees at work? Is you don’t you can’t. The truth is that motivation is not something that you do to someone. Motivation is something that people experience when the conditions are right. Motivation, therefore, is not an action that leaders take. It’s a reaction that employees have to a particular set of experiences that they have again and again and again. So, what are those experiences? Well, when I wrote my book, Employee, it was in part to answer this question. We analyzed more than 200 studies and articles on why people quit a job, why they take a new job, what leads them to stay with an organization long term, and we married it together with a whole boatload of social science research around why people give it all they’ve got in service to a role or to a company. And what we discovered is that there are three aspects of the employee experience that when delivered again and again and again lead to a whole workplace full of motivated employees. Those conditions are what we call an ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss. An ideal job is about how that job fits into the employee’s life. So, we’re talking about things like compensation and workload and uh flexibility, right? Does this job fit into my life in a way that does not create suffering for me outside of work? That second factor is meaningful work. It’s what I spend my time doing and who I’m doing it with. And so, we’re looking at dimensions of this around things like a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and getting to use my strengths at work. When I experience those conditions, I move from a mindset of I have to do it to I want to do it. And then the third factor is that great boss factor. This is about the person that oversees my work and that I interact with on a regular basis. And what we know is that if I have a boss who trusts me, coaches me, and advocates for me, I am much more likely to say, “Man, I’ve got a great boss.” And when you put those conditions together, ideal job, meaningful work, great boss, you get motivation. you have tapped into a kind of internal psychological scorecard that nearly every employee in every job in every company on planet earth is walking around with. Now, why are these the conditions that lead to motivation? It really comes down to understanding the difference between extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And you’ve probably heard these terms before. Extrinsic motivators are the outcomes that we get as a result of meeting certain expectations. Think carrot and stick, right? I am I am taking action either to get a reward or to avoid a consequence. Intrinsic motivators are on the other hand taking action because we find it fulfilling or interesting or it unleashes our creativity, or it results in a positive outcome that we find meaningful. So, for example, if you decide to work extra hours because you’re getting paid time and a half and you want to earn that extra money, that’s an extrinsic motivator. If you spend a little bit of extra time on a project for a client because you know they will really appreciate and notice the effort and the quality that you put into it. That’s an intrinsic motivator. And what we know, what social science research has shown us again and again and again is that there’s a ceiling to the amount of effort people will put into what they’re doing at work if we rely solely on extrinsic motivators. We also know that intrinsic motivators are a far more powerful way of motivating people to action and their level of effort gets sustained over a greater period of time when they are intrinsically motivated. Let me give you an example. Maybe you’ll remember back in the 80s that Pizza Hut started a program called Book It. You might remember this. schools signed up for this and did this in droves. And kids were told if you read a certain number of books in a period of time with this little punch card that you get, you could turn it in and get a personal pan pizza for free from Pizza Hut. And this program has been around for years. I actually think it’s still around these days. And what we know is that a lot of people on the surface pointed to book as a program that inspired higher and greater levels of reading among school students in the 80s and 90s. But a closer examination of the program found that the kids involved in the program, guess what they started doing in order to accelerate their path to their free pizza? they started reaching for easier and easier books. In other words, the external reward was the goal. It was not reading for fulfillment. It was not reading to understand the subject matter. It was reading to finish and check the box and acquire the right number of reading goals so that you could get the prize. Now, think about that in terms of the workplace. When we rely solely on extrinsic motivators, rewards or consequences, it will diminish the quality of the work involved from the people we are leading. Intrinsic motivators on the other hand lead people to care longer and try harder. Think of it this way. If I have uh two nephews and I want to inspire them to read over the summer, I could take on an extrinsic motivator setup like the book program and say if you read so many number of books by the end of the summer, I’ll give you this reward. But if my goal is for the quality of their effort to be high, I would have a much greater outcome if I went to my nephews who are baseball crazy and said, “So, you’ve got to read a book over the summer, but the good news is you get to pick a book on whatever subject you want.” And so, then I take them to the library and then my nephew finds a book about Roberto Clemente and then spends the summer reading that. What’s the quality of his participation and effort going to be like because he reached for something that he found fulfilling and interesting and compelling? It’s going to be much higher than if I had just relied on an extrinsic motivator to get him to read. This is why the factors of ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss have everything to do with unlocking employee commitment in the workplace, with creating an environment where employees are motivated to give it all they’ve got. And that that second factor that we talked about, that meaningful work factor especially taps into the attributes of intrinsic motivation. Meaningful work comes from the idea that I’m doing work that I believe matters, right? It has a purpose. It makes a difference in the lives of others. It’s work that taps into my strengths, my talents, my gifts. And when I get to do work that taps into my inherent strengths, I inevitably are going to find that more fulfilling. And then there’s that sense of belonging that we talked about. If I like the people, I’m doing this work with and I believe that it matters to them, I am much more likely to part with effort on their behalf. And so there you have it. These are the three factors that lead to a motivated employee. Are they in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss? Create those conditions and like I said, you’ll have a workplace full of motivated employees. Now, I’d love to know what you think. If you’re watching on YouTube, go ahead and drop a comment in the box below or you can email the show at boss bettergmail.com. And by the way, if you have a question that you would like to see answered on a future episode of Boss Better Now, leave a comment below or send us an email. And who knows, maybe I’ll tackle your question in a future episode. Thanks for being here. See you next time.

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