By Kagure Gacheche
What motivates us to do great work? It is a question that has been with us for centuries, and the traditional answer has always been outside motivators – pay raises, bonuses, a comfortable office, and so on.
Employees are thought to be professionals who get into their offices and keep their heads down, check off the day’s tasks without a fuss, put in the overtime required, and then get up the following day for another round of the same thing.
But if that’s the case, why are so many Kenyans involved in the infamous side hustle. And why are well-paid managers leaving their comfortable stations to start their own businesses, sometimes in a sector they know little about?
Recent research might demystify the phenomenon. It turns out that the thing that motivates us most is, well, ourselves.
Charity marathons
Think about people who sign up to participate in charity marathons. Most are not necessarily fit, nor do they imagine they’ll break any records or win any prize money, but they will wake up extra early to exercise and brave the excruciating muscle pain just to make sure they complete that 10, 21 or 42km race. They will complain about how hard it was and how much pain they’re in. But once they recover, most will not hesitate to sign up for the same “torture” the following year.
And researchers think that this kind of behaviour suggests that human beings attach more meaning to challenge than reward. We don’t mind putting in long hours if we know our efforts would be recognised.
So it turns out that we don’t work for money. Instead we work because we feel we are making meaningful progress towards a goal. Once we begin to feel like our work is futile, we get demotivated and no amount of money will make the daily grind worth it.
Take Mercy Roka. She has been working at a local private hospital as an administrative manager for the last four years, and while she complains about long hours that deny her a social life, she has no plans to quit her job because of the pleasure she gets seeing patients walk out of her institution better than they came in. Kidago Mirimbi works in publishing.
“I get up every morning to work on a textbook I’ve been looking at for three months because I believe I can change how children think. I make sure my illustrations show women as engineers, doctors and mechanics. I put women in empowering positions because I want girls to believe that they can do any job that they want,” she says.
Daniel Pink, author of ‘Drive’, cites research from a study done by MIT to argue that internal motivators, not external perks, inspire great work. The study showed that external motivators only work for people who do routine tasks. Once the barest minimum of creative thinking is required, financial rewards fail to elicit better results. In fact, if anything, they inspire worse performance.
Managing talent
So the best way to manage your talent – your thinkers, your problem solvers, your creative, your Mercys and Kidagos – is not with money, but by meeting their emotional and psychological needs.
According to psychology professor Edward Deci, this cadre of employees will thrive if three needs are met – they have a sense that what they are doing serves a purpose, they have the urge to be better at what they do, and they have the freedom to be innovative and do interesting things.
This way, whatever these employees create will have meaning and inspire ownership and pride, making them more productive,
If, on the other hand, these employees work in an environment where fear and sadness colour the mood, then they will avoid risk, rational decision-making and have difficulty planning or remembering tasks.
