Let me share a little secret with you.
You remember the game Super Mario? Then I'm sure you know the sound of a flipping coin whenever Mario gets to hit the brick with his head.
Sometimes, we feel demotivated, come late to work, or take long leaves. The tendency to slack off is just too strong.
What I have discovered in my observations of people is that one's level of motivation is not determined by salary. An employee who earns PHP 20,000 a month can be just as driven (or as demotivated) as someone who receives a six-digit paycheck.
While the benefits of money to productivity has been proven in a lot of studies, it cannot always determine whether a person will choose to sleep over a project or pull an all-nighter. At times, huge incentives turn the opposite way and decrease one's motivation to perform. It cannot predict whether or not a resignation letter will land on your desk and lose your talent to competition.
I have seen high-potential employees leaving companies for reasons that they won't divulge at exit interviews. Too often, such cases could have been prevented if someone sensed what was wrong and spoke to them before it was too late.
There was a paper which came out in December on motivation, an experiment conducted by scholars from three European universities. The team wanted to investigate the effect of motivational talk and its interaction with monetary incentives. The paper, "Hidden Benefits of Reward: A Field Experiment on Motivation and Monetary Incentives," presented the following findings:
1. Motivational talk improves performance significantly only when accompanied by performance pay.
2. Performance pay slightly reduces performance unless it is accompanied by motivational talk. These effects also carry over to the quality of work.
3. Performance pay alone leads to more mistakes. Adding motivational talk makes the difference. Motivational talk increases output by about 20% and reduces the ratio of mistakes by more than 40%.
These results show the complementarity of motivational talk and performance pay. While you cannot downplay the role of monetary incentive, it needs to be executed in tandem with motivational talk for it to become effective.
Let me stress at this point that motivational talk is not the same as giving feedback. Motivational talk helps employees give meaning to what they do. It gives them a sense of ownership and the feeling that what they do has a spot in the leader's big picture. This gives them the impetus needed to take on more difficult challenges (because if you ask me, sometimes all we need is a good challenge to motivate us).
Dr. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, echoes the same sentiment. He explains: “When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it: meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.”
Barbara Fielder, a motivation author, shared one technique in her book, Motivation in the Workplace. It's called the ten-coin technique. You place ten coins inside your right pocket and every time you praise or try to motivate someone, you take out the loose change and place it on the left pocket.
While I know that some people are not comfortable doing this right off the bat, it can be as simple as nodding to acknowledge that something was done right.
Let me show you a simple experiment.
Dr. Dan Ariely did a little experiment on paperwork to students at MIT. Each participant was handed a piece of paper with a jumble of letters in it. The task was to find two same letters that appear side by side and encircle such pairs. They were offered a certain amount for them to do the same activity repeatedly but each round was lesser than the previous one.
People in the first group wrote their names on the sheets and handed them to the experimenter, who scanned it and said “uh huh” before putting it in a pile.
The second group didn’t write their names, and the experimenter put their sheets in a pile without even looking at them.
Lastly, those in the third group had their work shredded immediately upon completion.
So what happened after?
Data collected showed that people whose work was shredded in front of them needed twice as much money as those whose work was acknowledged in order to keep doing the task.
What about the group whose work was ignored?
Well, the experimenter's data showed that this group needed almost as much money as the group whose work was shredded.
What does this tell us? Even when leaders unintentionally ignore reports, projects or whatever effort exerted by employees, it's almost tantamount to having those outputs sent directly to the trash bin. Employees would feel that work is really work. Similarly, a little acknowledgement like a nod can make employees feel that they matter, such that they would go to greater lengths even if the task seems repetitive and the rewards getting smaller.
The magic coin of motivation does not pertain to something which can be computed to arrive at the exact amount of incentive that will lead a person to operate at an optimum level of productivity. For if that was the case, companies do not need to tackle "soft" issues such as this one.
Instead, you could think of these coins as forms of investment that yield long-term gains, the kind of coins that true leaders put into piggybanks that when become full could possibly transform employees into superstars. Now that's magic.
*photos all from Google Images
You remember the game Super Mario? Then I'm sure you know the sound of a flipping coin whenever Mario gets to hit the brick with his head.
Yup, those bricks with question mark.
You see, whenever I get praised for something I did, I play that magical sound in my head, happy as a five-year-old kid who got a stamp on the arm for a job well done. I'm sure all of you have those moments too. Sometimes, we feel demotivated, come late to work, or take long leaves. The tendency to slack off is just too strong.
What I have discovered in my observations of people is that one's level of motivation is not determined by salary. An employee who earns PHP 20,000 a month can be just as driven (or as demotivated) as someone who receives a six-digit paycheck.
While the benefits of money to productivity has been proven in a lot of studies, it cannot always determine whether a person will choose to sleep over a project or pull an all-nighter. At times, huge incentives turn the opposite way and decrease one's motivation to perform. It cannot predict whether or not a resignation letter will land on your desk and lose your talent to competition.
I have seen high-potential employees leaving companies for reasons that they won't divulge at exit interviews. Too often, such cases could have been prevented if someone sensed what was wrong and spoke to them before it was too late.
There was a paper which came out in December on motivation, an experiment conducted by scholars from three European universities. The team wanted to investigate the effect of motivational talk and its interaction with monetary incentives. The paper, "Hidden Benefits of Reward: A Field Experiment on Motivation and Monetary Incentives," presented the following findings:
1. Motivational talk improves performance significantly only when accompanied by performance pay.
2. Performance pay slightly reduces performance unless it is accompanied by motivational talk. These effects also carry over to the quality of work.
3. Performance pay alone leads to more mistakes. Adding motivational talk makes the difference. Motivational talk increases output by about 20% and reduces the ratio of mistakes by more than 40%.
These results show the complementarity of motivational talk and performance pay. While you cannot downplay the role of monetary incentive, it needs to be executed in tandem with motivational talk for it to become effective.
Let me stress at this point that motivational talk is not the same as giving feedback. Motivational talk helps employees give meaning to what they do. It gives them a sense of ownership and the feeling that what they do has a spot in the leader's big picture. This gives them the impetus needed to take on more difficult challenges (because if you ask me, sometimes all we need is a good challenge to motivate us).
Dr. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, echoes the same sentiment. He explains: “When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it: meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.”
Barbara Fielder, a motivation author, shared one technique in her book, Motivation in the Workplace. It's called the ten-coin technique. You place ten coins inside your right pocket and every time you praise or try to motivate someone, you take out the loose change and place it on the left pocket.
Let me show you a simple experiment.
Dr. Dan Ariely did a little experiment on paperwork to students at MIT. Each participant was handed a piece of paper with a jumble of letters in it. The task was to find two same letters that appear side by side and encircle such pairs. They were offered a certain amount for them to do the same activity repeatedly but each round was lesser than the previous one.
People in the first group wrote their names on the sheets and handed them to the experimenter, who scanned it and said “uh huh” before putting it in a pile.
The second group didn’t write their names, and the experimenter put their sheets in a pile without even looking at them.
Lastly, those in the third group had their work shredded immediately upon completion.
So what happened after?
Data collected showed that people whose work was shredded in front of them needed twice as much money as those whose work was acknowledged in order to keep doing the task.
What about the group whose work was ignored?
Well, the experimenter's data showed that this group needed almost as much money as the group whose work was shredded.
What does this tell us? Even when leaders unintentionally ignore reports, projects or whatever effort exerted by employees, it's almost tantamount to having those outputs sent directly to the trash bin. Employees would feel that work is really work. Similarly, a little acknowledgement like a nod can make employees feel that they matter, such that they would go to greater lengths even if the task seems repetitive and the rewards getting smaller.
The magic coin of motivation does not pertain to something which can be computed to arrive at the exact amount of incentive that will lead a person to operate at an optimum level of productivity. For if that was the case, companies do not need to tackle "soft" issues such as this one.
Instead, you could think of these coins as forms of investment that yield long-term gains, the kind of coins that true leaders put into piggybanks that when become full could possibly transform employees into superstars. Now that's magic.
*photos all from Google Images
