Motivation Killers
What's Really Draining Your Teams
I wanted to share these, as I have spent time working on culture and change for governments and organizations, both as an employee and now as an owner of an agency.
I continue to have weekly conversations with people that want to know how they can approach change and use a more science based approach.
I see one familiar theme with the people I speak with, which is a strong interest in motivating employees.
Yet the role of motivation and engagement is often misunderstood when designing employee experiences, it is talked about for sure, but it is not approach from any serious evidence base.
Motivation and engagement are the most is challenging things to get right - and you have to have a solid grasp of a motivation theory among other things - and then take that theory and make it contextual and practical.
We use self-determination theory (SDT) Deci/Ryan - which we look at as a kind of motivation architecture as a first layer. It includes three basic needs employees (and really all of us) have:
1) Autonomy: Feeling in control of their behaviors and goals.
2) Competence: Gaining mastery of tasks and learning skills.
3) Relatedness: Experiencing a sense of belonging.
Meeting these needs can lead to improved employee well-being, performance, and overall good outcomes.
We then go deeper and use our ACTOR© model as a second layer to look at motivation more granularly:
So what does ACTOR© stand for?
Aspire: Aligns with long-term goals and personal relevance
Convince
Reinforces belief and identity-driven motivation Trigger: Activates emotionally-driven desire to engage
Overcome
Offsets internal blockers, distraction, and competing impulses Reduce: Makes action easy, fast, and intuitive
Of course we use these when other things that are making it hard to do a behavior have been addressed (which can include other factors, such as norms, environment, systems, policies etc..)
To increase engagement, we need to understand and address factors hindering or supporting workplace motivation.
Do you think motivation and engagement are things that are well understood and addressed in organizations?