What really motivates knowledge workers? The surprising truth.
Posted on 15. Apr, 2011 by donal in New Ways to Work
Most managers don’t know what motivates the people they work with. Do you think you do? Here’s a little test.
Read the following list of work place factors and order them by importance.
- Recognition
- Incentives
- Interpersonal support
- Support for making progress
- Clear goals
Keep your answers in mind and read on. You may well get a surprise.
Recently Linda Stone retweeted an interesting article about what really motivates knowledge workers. She also commented: “progress” is a primary motivator; “action steps” are more powerful than “tasks’.
Every year, the World Economic Forum & the Harvard Business Review publish a list of ten “breakthrough ideas” that can make the world a better place. One of the ideas on the list for 2010, is research by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, in which they argue that many managers are wrong about what motivates knowledge workers.
Over 600 managers were asked to rank a list of 5 workplace factors in terms of what they believed made knowledge workers enthusiastic about work (you guessed it, the five factors from earlier). The majority ranked “recognition for good work” #1. However, after analyzing 12,000 diary entries collected from workers over multiple years, Amabile and Kramer found that ‘making progress’ is actually the top motivator of performance. Interestingly, this was the factor ranked last by the managers surveyed.
How did you do?
The researchers state, “On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak.”
Amabile and Kramer suggest that this is good news for managers. Managers can influence factors that help or hinder their team’s sense of making progress.
Goshido gives people that sense of making progress highlighted by Amabile and Kramer. In Goshido, you break goals and tasks into actions and put them into personal plans, depending on their importance and urgency. At the start of each day you can pick the actions you intend to complete during the day, and mark them off when done. At days-end you have a record of your progress.
Turns out us knowledge workers are human after all.
Learn more:
- Read the article retweeted by Linda Stone.
- Read “What really motivates workers” by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer.
- Try Goshido, a new cloud-platform, which helps people: focus, communicate, and do their best work.