Motivation

This post is also available in: Swedish

This friday we had a workshop at work discussing motivation. An open, constructive afternoon.
But often, we talk about subjects without actually going deep into them to see what they really are about.

Motivation has always been very interesting to me. Interesting enough to warrant a big part of my psychology studies to the subject. To ask questions such as what motivates people? How do you get motivated? And what works against our motivation?

But to ask what motivates us, is to miss the point of what motivation is.

We do not become motivated, we are motivated.
Motivation is our natural state. A person is never completely motionless, but always in some kind of motion. Therefore, we do not have to motivate ourselves, what we need is to get rid of the obstacles that is suffocating our natural motivation.
Sometimes you hear the expression that “people are lazy by nature”, but that is in fact a invalid statement. We are by nature energy conservative, our bodies and minds are constructed in such a way as to minimize energy consumption, but that is far from being the same thing as lazy. To be lazy is to avoid work or movement at all costs and that is something we learn early on in life.

Just think about a newborn. Have you ever seen a baby that is not curious to explore it’s surroundings?
Of course, that doesn’t mean that all people running from one activity to the next is necessarily more motivated than others or that people laying in the hammock reading is lazy. Motivated people cannot necessarily be seen on the outside.

The question we should ask ourselves is not how to motivate people, but rather how we create an environment where peoples natural motivation springs forward.
At the workshop, I used the concept of “get out of my way”, och it basically means to minimize bureaucracies, hierarchies and obstacles so that the individual feel they are as autonomous as possible and in a position to make decisions about their own lives and work. This is why self-employed people are almost always more productive than employees and why small companies are usually more effective and large companies.
Unfortunately, this is not always possible in all situations, in part because of the fact that we sometimes has to accept a certain level of bureaucracy and structure to be able to organize things but in part also because a lot of people more or less has lost the ability to be self-motivated. If there is no external pressure, they won’t do a thing and if you give them too much freedom, the develop anxieties and insecurity.
I notice in myself how much I have changed the last years only. Before I enjoyed routine work more, but now I find it to be a burden. I want more freedom and a greater possibility to choose what to do with my time.

Some of the things that showed up during our talk was our paycheck and the physical work environemnt. A lot of people think that money is always motivating, but money is not a factor of motivation, the important thing is how it is used. If you leave for work every day, getting the same paycheck every month, your motivation is hardly affected at all by money.
Maybe you would be motivated the first month, but after that, you take it for granted. Because you expect to get paid for your work. It is a prerequisite for showing up. On the other hand, you would be very demoralized if you suddenly didn’t get paid.
These factors are called hygiene factors. Things that would not affect your motivaiton positively, but would lower it considerably if it disappeared.

For money to be a factor of motivation, it has to be variable depending on effort put in. If you can increase your paycheck by putting in more effort the coming few hours, you might get motivated to do it, but the further off the reward is from the effort put in, the less it will affect your motivation. Therefore it is usually pretty much usuless to throw away billions in bonus programmes on last years result. It might be a nice benefit, but it doesn’t really change your motivation or your productivity.
Same with the physical work environment. It sure is nice to sit in a nice office, but it will most likely only affect your motivation when you are freezing your butt off.

The problem with most talks around motivation is that you usually focus on solving various problems instead of creating an ideal work environment, because it is more concrete, it is easier to act, to do something. But to create a positive environment you have to let go off control, coach your employees. Change the leadership. Things like that can seem dangerous, because we don’t know what results it will give and measuring the results is harder.