Motivation and Rewards

Motivation is an important part of any work environment, but how to do we make people motivate themselves? When we watched the video on the science of motivation, Daniel Pink made some points that really stuck out to me. He explained that there was an experiment done where there were two groups of people separated into different rooms. One room was asked to do a task and they would time them to find the average time to get the task done. The other room was offered money for the person who completed the task first. The room that was offered the rewards completed the task about three minutes faster. This shows that some people need a reward to be motivated. However, they also did a similar experiment but the task needed some creativity. At the end of this task they found that the people who were offered the rewards did not make as good of a product as the ones who were not. This makes things difficult. Should you offer your employees a reward so they work faster and possibly sacrifice quality, or hope they are motivated enough to make a good product in a good amount of time?

I think the best way to go about motivating your employees is through positive words. If you tell them they did something well, that could motivate them to do it just as well if not better the next time. However, I also believe employees should be offered rewards. If you have an employee of the month, your employees will be working hard all year trying to earn the title each month. In conclusion, I believe it is important for your employees to be motivated, but they should not always be motivated through rewards. A balance between positive words and rewards should make for a great working environment and motivated employees.