How Employees Are Motivated: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

Dan Pink's book Drive and his talk on the new science of motivation led many leaders to rethink how they motivate employees. His argument is that paying more for faster output can buy incremental gains on simple tasks, but people do their best creative work when they have Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. The examples below show what that looks like in practice and what an organization can borrow from them.

Encarta vs. Wikipedia

Microsoft started Encarta in the mid-1990s. It paid professionals to write an encyclopedia, managed the project to deadlines and leadership's specifications, rewarded timeliness and volume of output, and sold the result on CD. Wikipedia started in 2001 with mostly anonymous online volunteers. It gave the encyclopedia away on the web, paid its writers nothing, and rewarded them with a shared mission and public recognition for those who went the extra mile.

Whether it meant to or not, Wikipedia built a culture of all three drivers:

• Autonomy: thousands of people working on their own, for fun.
• Mastery: adding one's own expertise and earning respect within the community.
• Purpose: being part of a movement to create a shared body of knowledge for the world.

Encarta published about 62,000 articles in six languages despite its head start, and Microsoft shut it down in 2009. Wikipedia kept growing on volunteer work and became one of the most-visited websites in the world.

Reward good work with recognition and responsibility

Wikipedia's rewards do not come as a bonus check. Dedicated, active contributors can be made administrators, which gives them responsibility for the final draft of articles read by millions. They become the gatekeepers of a movement they believe in, and within the community that honor is worth more than money. The lesson for other organizations is that public recognition and added responsibility can motivate more than a cash incentive.

Cobb EMC, an electric cooperative near Atlanta, built recognition into its “Idea Machine,” a way for any staff member to anonymously offer suggestions to leadership. Approved ideas became linked projects in ClearPoint with a project manager accountable for them. Submitters of exceptional ideas received a coveted Wattee award and a sit-down lunch with the CEO. One staff idea led to a recycling program that went from submission to vendor selection in only eight months.

Atlassian's "FedEx" day

The software company Atlassian held a 24-hour event called "FedEx." Developers could work on anything they wanted, as long as they delivered something overnight. It sounds like a recipe for wasted time, but the event led to many important product developments. Winners were celebrated across the company, and winning was prized far more than an arbitrary cash payment would have been.

• Autonomy: freedom to work on whatever they liked.
• Mastery: the chance to build something they were expert in and cared about.
• Purpose: a high-visibility project that mattered to the company and earned colleagues' admiration.

Google's 20% time

Google became known for giving employees "20% time," the equivalent of one workday a week to spend on any project that interested them. Gmail, Google News, and other popular services came out of that time. Like Atlassian, Google treated new ideas as the source of its future and gave employees the autonomy to pursue them.

Why freedom produces responsibility

The most surprising lesson from Pink's work is that greater freedom often produces greater responsibility. Given the chance, people work harder and think smarter for their own sake. Simple tasks, clear goals, and more money for faster output can buy incremental improvements, but intrinsic motivation, where work is its own reward, is what drives creative solutions and transformative results.

The City of Arvada, Colorado, saw this when it rolled out ClearPoint. Employees in all departments had access to the tool and managed their own performance measures, with autonomy and accountability as the focal points. The city’s Performance Budget Manager recognized that Arvada employees, given the right amount of freedom, would take their performance management to the next level. An unexpected result followed: users began adding projects that linked to their performance metrics, and departments tracked those projects in ways that worked best for them.

For Purpose in particular, it helps when people can see how their work connects to where the organization is going, which is one reason to communicate strategy clearly. From there, the lesson from these examples is to trust employees and give them the freedom to innovate.

Edenor, a utility serving over 9 million residents in Buenos Aires, saw what happens when purpose is missing. Teams were unaware of their contribution to the strategy, and that lack of understanding came with a lack of engagement.