Properly motivated employees represent one of the basic prerequisites of a successful company. Motivation can create incredible power and enable you to perform at your best. It is important not only in professional life, but also for the person himself.

When we first read that money is a demotivator, we don’t want to believe it. However, this fact has been verified several times in practice, and each time the result is the same. Those who were motivated by financial means for a certain activity usually achieved much lower performance than those who did not have this incentive. Why is that so? It is associated with a form of motivation that Daniel H. Pink explains very well in his book Drive.

So what does the word motivation mean? We can find many definitions of the term motivation. Likewise, there are many motivational theories that deal with motives as causes of behavior. That is, what leads us to do specific things.

Daniel H. Pink divides motivation as follows:

Motivation 1.0 – here people are driven only by their own instincts – survival instinct, hunger, thirst, sexual instinct. These are primitive drives that lead us to a given activity.

Motivation 2.0 is often referred to as the method of reward and punishment (sugar and whip method). Either the promise of reward (financial, paid vacation, certain benefits, concessions) or the threat of punishment (financial, loss of benefits, public reprimand) serves as the drive for the given activity. Until the nineties of the last century, this form of motivation worked relatively well. Frederick Winslow Taylor advocated a technocratic approach to managing people, which is based on rewarding desirable behavior and punishing undesirable behavior. However, this is no longer a functioning model nowadays, which can only be seen in automatic activities (administration, line work).

Motivation 3.0 is based on internal motivation and the internal belief that what we do has some meaning and at the same time we enjoy it. It is important that we have enough autonomy and desire to become better in the given activity. It is precisely the inner compulsion to do something meaningful that we enjoy, to do it our way and to be good at it. Then we are able to experience what Daniel H. Pink calls a state of flow.

A very beautiful example in favor of non-financial motivation 3.0 is the fight between two encyclopedias. It was 1996, when two encyclopedias MSN Encarta and Wikipedia were created. The first is a product of the computer giant Microsoft with huge financial support and a hundred paid people. Wikipedia is a voluntary creation of enthusiasts who were not paid in any way for their work. At the time of the birth of both encyclopedias, it would be hard for anyone to bet on Wikipedia as a more successful project. And indeed it was, as the MSN Encarta encyclopedia ended in 2011. So here is a nice example of how things we do out of conviction and internal motivation are far more powerful than those stimulated by external factors.

Practical instructions for using motivation 3.0

But how to translate motivation 3.0 into real practice, how to really motivate people in corporations? Try to give people autonomy, tell them the goal but leave the journey up to them. After all, I fulfill my own idea much more than the idea of ​​someone else, who is also my boss. Try to awaken inner motivation in each of them, try to make work more fun for employees. Find out what your people are really good at, then let them develop their mastery. Give them room to develop and be better. At the same time, it is necessary that everyone knows the mission that the given corporation is pursuing. What is the meaning of what we do. If people do not know the purpose, then they cannot be motivated to do the activity with inner conviction. The combination of autonomy, the ability to work on oneself and a common goal is the key to success that brings unprecedented results