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:

Why we built Goshido

Posted on 07. Apr, 2011 by ger in New Ways to Work, Product

Goshido is a labour of love that was born of frustration – a frustration that many people share.

Juggling Projects in Intel

I was a software architect working on a large project in Intel and our new chip was just spluttering into life. Engineers in Ireland, USA (Massachusetts & Arizona) and India were working day and night to keep the project moving. I arrived into the office one morning, picked up a tea in the canteen and headed for my desk. As my laptop woke, I sipped some tea. As Outlook synced new emails from the server, I checked the share price on Yahoo Finance, +15c. I wondered how the testing had gone in Phoenix over the weekend.

My mood imploded. 253 unread emails in my inbox. Groan.

Inbox Zero

At the time, I was trying Merlin Mann’s excellent inbox zero technique, so I set to work triaging my emails.

Inbox zero suggests you skim each email and decide if it’s an action, information or noise. If it’s actionable and easy to do – do it. If it’s actionable and takes a bit longer, mark it for later processing. If it’s not actionable, delete it or archive it.

Sometimes it can be hard to categorize an email. Some emails drag on and on with the action is hidden in the third last paragraph. To be honest, I wandered off track, spent at least 20 minutes writing a reply to an email about another project before I remembered inbox zero. 2 hours, 8 minutes later I was at inbox zero and I had 16 emails marked as actionable. The good news: the testing had gone well in Phoenix. The bad news: my brain was fried by all of the context switches as I lurched from one email to the next. I needed another cup of tea.

A Universal Problem

This tale of woe is repeated in offices and workplaces around the world every day. Email is really just a symptom of the problem. Most people are juggling many chunks of work at the same time, don’t communicate about them effectively, get distracted by the urgent stuff, and veer away from the important. Tension escalates. Groups try to remedy this by spending time in meetings or writing status reports or crafting even more emails.

Over the years I’ve worked in big companies and tiny companies and the problem affects both in different ways. While big companies might have many people on a project, small companies tend to have many small informal projects.

What about tool X?

Over the years I’d tried many many tools: web-based collaboration, enterprise social, wikis, project management, and bug-trackers. The web-collaboration tools worked well for projects of moderate size (and small numbers of them). The wikis and enterprise social tools worked well for sharing information, not so good for coordinating action. The project management and bug trackers worked well for engineers but saw low adoption in cross-disciplinary teams.

For one reason or another, the teams I worked with, abandoned the new tool and drifted back to emails and shared documents/spreadsheets.

Techniques that work

Despite these tools issues, I’ve tried interesting techniques like Scrum (a form of agile project management), GTD (a brilliant personal productivity technique by David Allen), and mindfulness. However the tools for these techniques are either specific to a domain (like software development), for individuals (not teams), or non-existent. Some of the projects I worked on achieved significant successes with Scrum, using nothing more than a truck-load of post-its and a sense of humor.

So that’s why we’ve built Goshido – a cloud platform that can help you (and the people you work with):

  • Focus on doing the things that matter
  • Communicate with clarity about actions
  • Complete massive projects (or 100s of informal ones)

Next steps

So if you feel overwhelmed by all the work coming at you, and you’ve tried lots of other tools and found them wanting, try something different:
Try Goshido (free trial)

We hope you find Goshido as useful as we do, and if you do, be sure to let us know.

9+2 things successful people do differently

Posted on 23. Mar, 2011 by ger in New Ways to Work

I’m usually wary of blog posts like “N tips to accomplish your goals”. All too often they’re filled with reheated motivational cliches. Heidi Grant Halvorson’s recent post on the Harvard Business Review Blog is different. Heidi recommends “9 things successful people do differently”. I’m going to add two more to her list.

First, here are some examples from Heidi.

Seize the moment to act on your goals

“… decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance … Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.”

Know exactly how far you have left to go

“Check your progress frequently – weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.”

Be a realistic optimist

“Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.”

Focus on getting better, rather than being good

“Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed … As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.”

Mitch McCrimmon, one of the commenters on Heidi’s post, added a 10th recommendation.

Review and celebrate successes

“We need a sense of making progress, not just a feeling that there is so much more to do.”

Finally, to turn the volume up to 11, I’ll add another related recommendation.

Break a goal or project down into bite-size chunks

Richard Wiseman conducted a large-scale scientific study a few years ago into the psychology of motivation. The more successful participants broke down their high-level goals into a series of sub-goals. If you use this technique you’ll achieve small successes that build up to audacious accomplishments.

Learn more

  • Read Heidi’s blog post or check out her new book Succeed, which is getting great reviews on Amazon
  • Read Richard Wiseman’s book 59 Seconds
  • Try Goshido, a new cloud-platform, which helps people: focus, communicate, and do their best work.

Can you recommend other good ideas?

The Monk and the Knowledge Worker

Posted on 14. Mar, 2011 by donal in New Ways to Work

I heard a story recently that is anecdotal for how knowledge workers experience their work life.
 
A Buddhist monk was speaking about the early years of his training in Thailand. One day, an elderly Thai man came to his hut with word of a waiting visitor. The monk jumped out of meditation, quickly put on his outer robes and hurried off across the monastery compound. As he walked his head filled with thoughts. Who might it be? What might they want? Was there a problem? Why hadn’t he been given more notice?

Mid-way across the compound the old man caught up to him. “You don’t walk like your teacher”, he said. 

The monk stopped and asked, “How does my teacher walk”?

“One step at a time”, came the reply. 
 
Similarly, at work, our heads can be so full of things that we’re not able to give ourselves completely to the task at hand. There is so much to juggle, so much to keep track of, so much that’s unclear.  There are so many interruptions and distractions. Just like the monk, we could all do with someone or something to help us manage our attention better. Where our attention goes, ‘we’ go.  And all too often we’re not giving our best attention to the work that really matters.
 
It’s vital to have a tool that clearly shows the actions that need to happen for progress to be made in our work commitments – to be able to queue these actions is a systematic way – to have peace of mind knowing that what’s important won’t be forgotten – to feel reassured that information won’t ‘fall between the cracks’. 

We’ve built Goshido to be that tool – to help you and your teams succeed. Why not try it today at no cost? See for yourself how it benefits your experience of work.

Goshido Product Update

Posted on 02. Mar, 2011 by tom in New Ways to Work

Last week the Goshido product team delivered an exciting new release, and I’d like to share a few of the new features here. We keep working to make it easier for you to get to the actions and updates most important to you.

  • One click to all updates: from any action, you’re now one click away from all of the updates on not just that action, but updates on all subactions too.
  • Better work plans: we’ve made some changes to how plans work in Goshido, and you can learn more and watch a video in our Help center.
  • More information about a person’s activities: in addition to the actions you’re authorized to see, with one click you can now see a person’s updates across all of the actions and projects to which you’re subscribed.
  • Goshido bookmarklet: also new in our Help center, you can now grab a Goshido bookmarklet to add to your browser. Just select and bookmark things in your browser bar and it will create actions in Goshido.

As always, let us know what we can do to help you work better together. That’s our mission.

Organization Structure and Working

Posted on 17. Feb, 2011 by tom in New Ways to Work

We talk a lot at Goshido about new ways of working. And not only do we talk about what might be considered best practices – we actually put many of these concepts to the test every day in both our activities and our product development efforts. With this in mind, two blog postings last week caught my eye on the themes of organization structure and getting work done.

The first posting was actually a rather lengthy and thought-provoking article by Dave Gray of XPLANE ⎟ Dachis Group. Titled The Connected Company, Dave posits some well-considered arguments comparing long-lived companies to cities, which are in turn a metaphor for complex organisms. I’m a firm believer that building and maintaining a company’s distinct culture is step one in building a successful enterprise. Dave provides some much-appreciated depth on this topic.

The second posting focuses on Agile, and the challenges large development organizations face when it comes to release planning. While I’m probably not qualified to state that Release Planning is Evil, I’m enough of a common sense guy to buy into Erik Huddleston’s notion that planning methods need to better reflect the flexible and organic nature of work and teams in today’s company. Sometimes work involves 400 people on 1 project, but more likely, work involves 4 people on 100 projects, with those 4 person teams shifting dynamically based on the specific problems at hand.

Let us know what you think. We want Goshido to help empower you to work more effectively.

New Years Resolutions? It’s not too late!

Posted on 03. Feb, 2011 by tom in New Ways to Work

Punxsutawney Phil has made his annual appearance, but given the mountain of snow in my front yard, I hope you’ll forgive my skepticism regarding his prediction of an early Spring. By this time of year, many of us are happier to see our old classmate Ned Ryerson than think about the New Years resolutions we’ve already left behind. Fortunately, it’s never too late to learn about new ways to work.

Goshido is all about helping individuals, teams and organizations work more effectively. No matter where you sit in an organization – Enterprise 2.0, social business, or creating a Getting Things Done plan, can help make work better.

I’ve been involved in software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses since 1999. One of the most gratifying things I’ve seen is the dovetailing of some of the best benefits of SaaS with trends in the workplace, such as Agile. SaaS gives you frequent product updates, tight customer feedback loops, and ad hoc collaboration giving superior service. The benefits of Agile are now extending beyond software development into areas such as sales and marketing.

The new ways of work are here to stay, and Goshido is designed to help you make the most of them. Take a look and let us know how we’re doing.

You can try Goshido at no cost today.

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