Motivation and remote work
The way of doing work is changing while more companies adapt to remote working. Some companies have been working remotely since March and are planning to work remotely until... Hm, let’s say “until further notice” for now.
I believe a lot of people have struggled at the beginning, but more and more people are getting used to (or at least accepting) working remotely. People in IT sector had remote work in their agenda with “work from home” even before it began to be mandatory due to circumstances. But that was maybe a couple of days per week or month, not 100% remote as it is now.
The remote work will be in our agenda for a while. But how will it affect overall motivation? Initially, let’s have a look on Dan Ariel’s motivation factors and Daniel Pink’s motivation theory.
Motivation factors
Dan Ariely, professor in behavioral economics and psychology, mentions three motivational factors in his book The upside of irrationality; Payment, Meaning and Creating.
- Payment. Payment is a conditional reward and it should be used very carefully. There is a risk that once the conditional reward is removed, the interest in the work will be lost. Payment as motivation is very short-lived.
Dan Ariely has made an experiment on high bonuses. People offered medium bonus performed the same as the ones that were offered low bonus. The group that were offered the biggest bonus performed worst than the other two groups across all the tasks. Payment works as a motivation factor when the task includes mechanical skill, that is, physical work. But this doesn’t mean low payment; don’t only focus on bonus and payment keep payment high, so it gets out of the way. - Meaning. People want to feel like they’re contributing and feel a sense of purpose. Another experiment made by Dan Ariely is the Lego experiment. The participants were paid to build Lego Bionicle. They got $2 got the first built Bionicle, $1.7 for the second one and so on linearly. There were two groups. The first group stored the built Bionicle on the table in front of them and then started to build the next Bionicle. The second group’s Bionicle were destroyed immediately after it was build (the experimenter assembled it and put it back to its box) and the participants started to build the next Bionicle. The participant was always rebuilding previously assembled Bionicle. The second group could not see any meaning and quit the experiment earlier than the first group. As for the participants in the second group, seeing the results even for a short time was enough to improve performance and keep up building the next Bionicle.
- Creating. The more effort we put into our work, the more pride we take in it. This is called the “IKEA effect”. Following experiment was done: Participants were ask to build IKEA boxes and then put bid on them. Participants bid more to their own assembled boxes than identical pre-assembled boxes. This showed that participants valued self-assembled products more than pre-assembled ones.
Motivation theory
As the way of work is changing, so does the motivation factor change. Daniel H. Pink describes the “motivation theory” with three types of motivation in his book Drive:
- Motivation 1.0. Humans are biological creatures and in Motivation 1.0 the motivation is the survival drive (food and security).
- Motivation 2.0. As the industrial revolution began there were a lot of studies on motivation. In Motivation 2.0, external motivation gets in highlight and the it is about reward the good work and punish the bad one (carrot and stick).
- Motivation 3.0 As the work moved from physical to knowledge based the motivation factors also changed. Knowledge based work is motivated by internal factors. Humans have a drive to learn and create. Daniel Pink is mentioning three elements for Motivation 3.0: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
* Autonomy is about the desire to direct our own lives, self-direction. Example of this at work is innovation time at work and flexible work hours.
* Mastery is about continually improve and get better skills.
* Purpose is about finding a purpose in the work and do things that matter.
The mentioned motivation factors and elements, beside payment, are all intrinsic motivation factors. Assuming the salary is in a reasonable range, I think we can leave out payment while evaluating remote work and motivation.
Mastery and creating are motivation factors that you can do remotely by your own and sometimes you should do it on your own to be in “flow”.
At first sight, it might seem that motivation factors autonomy, meaning and purpose are independent on remote work. But at the office, the spark for autonomy or meaning was maybe created during a chit-chat at the water cooler or coffee machine. Or, the purpose was fulfilled during a volunteer project.
Remote work will affect our motivation. It will affect most of the motivation factors since the human interaction is not there by default. What we can do is to focus on our inner motivation and boost it by creating, learning and keeping up the human interaction and communication.
