I’m writing this blog post at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night. Insert your joke about my lack of a life here. I don’t get paid extra for working on Saturday night. I won’t get fired if I don’t write this blog post. I doubt my boss would even notice if we didn’t have a blog post today.
Why am I writing this blog post?
Because I enjoy writing. I always have and I probably always will. I also think it’s the right thing to do. Studies continue to show that the more great content a company has, the more likely they are to rank high in search engines. Ranking high in search engines results in more visitors and more awareness of our brand. More brand awareness translates to more leads. More leads generate more sales. More sales keeps the lights on.
So why am I writing this blog post? Because I’m intrinsically motivated to do it. Not only do I enjoy it, but my business has given me the freedom to write about whatever I want whenever I want. And, I think it’s the right thing to do.
You know what's fascinating about intrinsic motivation? Studies show that people that are intrinsically motivated perform better than people who have extrinsic motivation - like earning more money or some other outside reward. In a study by Edward Deci, a professor from the University of Rochester in New York and a pioneer of research on intrinsic motivation, a group of students was offered money as a motivator to solve certain problems. He also got another group of students to solve the problems without any extrinsic reward. Interestingly, he found that the unpaid students were more willing than the paid students to keep working on the problems – even after the study had finished.
Though paying people more as an incentive has been a business practice for years, money isn’t the greatest motivator of people. Nor is it the biggest predictor of success. I’ve managed people and I’ve noticed the same thing. Employees who are self-motivated perform better than those who are motivated by some exterior goal - whether that be money, attention or some other reward.
So how do you unlock the intrinsic motivations in employees? Here are 6 ways:
Set Goals
After his 2100 yard rushing season - the second most in a single season in the history of the NFL, Adrian Peterson set a goal to rush for 2500 yards. That’s an outrageous number, but it showed what Peterson wanted to achieve.
In order to unlock intrinsic motivation, you need to set stretch goals. For example, our goal is to have 10,000 customers for our field service software in 10 years. We also set individual goals for each employee. Without those goals, employees don’t have anything to work toward, and you have nothing to measure them by.
Unlock Their Inner Child
I was visiting a customer that employed a three-person call center for cold calling prospecs for their commercial landscape maintenance business. If you’ve ever performed cold calling, you know it’s not the most exiciting thing in the world. It usually involves calling hundreds of people a day and saying basically the same thing to them. We’ve tried it in our business and so far have been unable to find anyone that enjoyed it.
How do you make people enjoy it? By unlocking their inner child. My two-year is curious about everything. His brain is soaking up a lot of new information. You want your employees to do the same thing. How? By making them curious about what their doing. In the example of cold calling, maybe that means giving them a goal of trying to learn the best time to call. Or letting them determine what message works best. If you include ways that help them learn - instead of just giving them a pre-defined script - they’ll be more likely to perform better.
Give Up Control
Former St. John’s University coach John Gagliardi won nearly 500 college football games in a coaching career that spanned more than 6 decades. And he did it by letting his players determine the plays. That’s right, his quarterbacks were primarily responsible for calling plays.
I’m guessing Gagliardi would have been nearly as successful if he called the plays, but by giving up that control - something most coaches would never do - his players felt like they were making a difference. They felt less like a cog in a machine and more like they were in control of their destiny.
If you let your team have a little control over their work, they’ll be more likely to perform better. It’s human nature - if people feel they’re being told what to do, they’ll be less likely to do whatever they are told to do. But if it’s their idea, they’ll be more likely to work hard to make it a success.
Gamify
I use software called HubSpot. One of the ways they incentivize me to talk about their business is through a program called HubStars. At its core, it’s an online community of HubSpot users. But they’ve turned promoting HubSpot into a game. They give their HubStars like me tasks to do - tweet about a blog post, write an online review, post to the forum - and then assign points to each of those tasks. Not only can you redeem those points for things like Starbucks and Target gift cards, but also a leaderboard that shows me how I compare to other HubStars. They’ve turned customer referral marketing into a game.
By gamifying work, you make it less like work. So create a set of rules, award points to allow employees to redeem those points for rewards. For example, if you just installed field service software, award points to your field employees who successfully use it to time in and out. By turning it into a game, you’ll be more likely to see results that you wouldn’t see if you told them to time in and out on their tablet.
Competition
A common sales practice for large corporations is to publish the number of sales each rep has. At my last employer, we had a weekly meeting where sales rep performance was on display. It certainly served as a motivator to the sales reps.
By nature, humans are competitive. We want to be the best. By building competition into your business, you’ll get more out of them. So have your employees compete for awards large and small. For your field employees, award the employee who has the greatest percentage of productive time in a given time period. Or, you could use the ratings generated by our service business marketing solution, HindSite Connect, to measure which crews or employees perform best and rewards those that do.
Recognition
A friend of mine works for a business that, on a weekly business, randomly reviews emails sent by their support and sales organizations. You may think “Oh, that’s scary.” But more often than not, that review turns into a positive experience for the person whose work is being reviewed. They often get kudos for going above and beyond for their customers.
If you want your employees to perform, you need to recognize when they do a great job. Build recognition into your daily or weekly routine. For example, if you have a periodic team meeting, be sure to include a portion of time to praise employees who have done great work. When doing so, be specific. You want your employees to know exactly what they’ve done that’s earned your praise.
Great employees lead to high performing employees. Learn how to hire great employees for your business by downloading our free eBook, How to Hire the Best Employees for Your Green Industry Business.
