All about motivation
Salute, habrovchane!
Here is another Monday, which means that throughout the country, and throughout the world, millions of people “will again go to this work,” in which they are only happy on Friday and payday. So I wanted to share my thoughts on motivation at work - the motivation of myself and others. I will try to show that often the negative emotions experienced from work are not associated with the type of activity, but with the wrong organization, and that by performing the same actions differently, one can achieve amazing results in one’s own emotional mood, which cannot but affect on the results. But first things first.
')
The reason for the degradation of efficiency lies in the fact that a high degree of uncertainty is inherent in the IT sphere itself, which requires a high degree of intellectual involvement from an employee, whether project or operational. Do not think that motivation is needed only in the field of IT. By no means. In any field, motivation increases labor efficiency, and my examples with a spatula and sand prove this. Just in IT, employee motivation changes the efficiency of work by orders of magnitude. The proof of this thesis is a topic for a separate article, so we will not focus on this here.
So, motivated employees are a means of saving project resources, such as the time and effort of a project manager. Unmotivated employees have to drive like a shepherd to avoid wandering, motivated employees can be led like the leader of a wolf pack.
This definition provides the life of the running processes, not letting them fade away. In a sense, this definition is equivalent to the definition of engagement of users who provide viral marketing of the product. And this is not surprising. User involvement is based on the same cognitive mechanisms as employee motivation, and the marketing company is similar to collective project creativity.
This definition also shows why, in the absence of motivation (or at low rates of it), the project needs periodic injection of energy in the form of kicks and so beloved by all employees questions "well, how is the task there?". If you ride a bike, you need to pedal all the time. By car, you can press the pedal once, and she herself will get lucky. Motivation, by the way, is etymologically and goes back to the Latin verb moveo, meaning “to move” (compare with English move).
When expectations coincide with reality, the brain rewards itself with the release of dopamine , a neurotransmitter responsible for securing a positive human experience. For example, dopamine is actively released during sex and eating delicious food. In a sense, dopamine is the chemistry that is responsible for happiness. In the same sense, the brain is happy when it does not make mistakes.
The more data the brain has about the results of the upcoming action, the more accurately it builds a forecast. The lower the probability of achieving a prediction as a result of the action being performed, the more dopamine is secreted by the brain in order to “mark a successful release.” Thus, the accumulated experience improves the accuracy of predictions, reducing the improbability of success, giving the committed action a hue of despondency. It is on this formula that the routine is based - repetitive actions offer no challenges to the brain, so it takes a dopamine diet.
However, this is only the first part. After the action is complete, it is vital for the brain to know where the resources that it has invested are spent. If this information is hidden from the brain, he is just as disappointed as if he didn’t know what to expect. Feedback is a vital mechanism for increasing motivation. Not just the connection itself, but also the timeliness of it. There are even mechanisms in the brain that replace the perception of time in order to provide a motor causal connection. That is why working with a decelerating application that asynchronously responds to actions, so infuriates users - the feedback is violated, closing the motivational cycle.
Any action taken by staff within a project should have the following three components:
It is important to understand that bringing the task context is not a formal process, and it is not necessary to conduct a confidential conversation with an employee before each task. If the context is clear based on past experience, the brain will build a goal without suggestion or persuasion. Therefore, to save energy on the introduction into the context of the task, it is important to build the process so that the completion of one task is the context for the subsequent one - then you can save on introductory conversations. However, if there is no certainty about the context, you cannot save money on a conversation under any circumstances - otherwise you can forget about the personal responsibility of the employee for the work.
Setting a task is not necessarily expressed by your wording to the employee. Best of all, when an employee himself formulates the task that he understood, and you agree with her. I had a manager (the best in the world!) Who never said what needs to be done. He just started talking about the project until you yourself said that you should do this, this and that. Then he said - oh fine, will you? How not to do something after this? Note that this approach also ensures that the task is understood correctly. The answer “aha”, expressed as a result of familiarization with the wording of the task, does not mean that the person understood exactly what is written there.
That is why feedback is an ongoing process. This is not an annual (yes at least quarterly) conversation on certification in the style of "you are well done! Keep it up!". How to hold? Again, the feedback does not have to be verbal. After each successful assembly, it is not necessary to resort to the employees, to shake their hands and kiss on the cheek. It is enough for a person to see where his work has gone and how it merged with the overall project. See clearly, without additional effort. Determining that the task is completed successfully should not be a source for another task, so that excuses such as “let them open the bugtracker and look for” are not rolled. The work process should be visualized, easily accessible and visual. The completed task should itself return the feedback to the employee, showing that he is consonant with the project, and that his ideas of beauty correspond to the ideas of the project as a whole.
From all this variety of motivations we isolate two levels that are most important for building a process of motivated development.
In the case of the wall, I had no task motivation, since the actions of my brain did not affect the achievement of the goal. Having learned how to scrape paint, my brain raised its experience to a level where its predictions about the success of the spatula motion coincided 100% with the result, so the routine began to depress it. When I came up with the “surround and destroy” game, each new environment offered the brain a new task that it had not yet solved, so it was interesting for him to solve the optimal strategy of environment and annihilation every time, depending on the topography. As a result, the brain received a bunch of interesting tasks, which it was interesting to solve even in isolation from the context, for the sake of which it does it. I could scrape the paint off this method even from the Great Wall of China, but the brain would all play like the brain of an avid gamer.
In the case of sand buckets, the task was uninteresting and uncomfortable by definition - dragging 24 kg of sand to the fifth floor has a minimum level of uncertainty and a maximum level of discomfort. However, having presented the goal, segu, I endowed each of the uninteresting tasks with a fictional reward, showing my progress towards the final goal. Even though it was self-hypnosis, the brain endowed each of the actions with a hypothesis, which he had no reason to refute. Therefore, he was filled with happiness, dopamine after each rise. And not only this. He also anticipated happiness on the rise, but what is happiness, if not anticipation of happiness?
Often, motivation is considered a fiery speech at a meeting, especially if the speaker has the gift of a speaker. Who, listening to the speech of William Wallace before the battle of Stirling in “Brave Heart”, does not feel in himself the strength to rush into battle? Who, listening to the speech of King Theoden before attacking the army of Mordor, is not ready to shout "To death!" And rush to drown the reptiles? What is this if not motivation? Yes, this is motivation, but if you look closely, it all happens before the battle. On this motivation, you can leave the battle, but on such a motivation not to win the war. In our terminology, this is a task motivation, but it will quickly fade away if it is not supported by feedback after the heated wars come out of battle.
Here is another Monday, which means that throughout the country, and throughout the world, millions of people “will again go to this work,” in which they are only happy on Friday and payday. So I wanted to share my thoughts on motivation at work - the motivation of myself and others. I will try to show that often the negative emotions experienced from work are not associated with the type of activity, but with the wrong organization, and that by performing the same actions differently, one can achieve amazing results in one’s own emotional mood, which cannot but affect on the results. But first things first.
Uninteresting work does not happen
I am a programmer by profession, and loving a programmer is easy. She is somewhere on the verge of creativity and science. That everyone will love. Therefore, as an example, I will talk about my working childhood, when I was not yet a programmer, and show how I managed to find interest in my work.Spatula and wall
Somehow, I was obliged to scrape the spatula (such a flat flexible spatula) with oil paint off the kitchen wall. At the stage of reconnaissance of the new instrument, at which I became acquainted with the most effective movements, there was still nothing. But when I discovered that you couldn’t just cut off the paint like peel from potatoes, and appreciated the results of my works, expressed by a small speck, with a threatening amount of work to be done in the amount of one wall, I was thoroughly depressed. What can you do? Work is work. I took to scrape the wall, looking from nothing to do to the front of work. The line between the cleaned and unpurified territory was distortedly distorted (to whom, if not to me, to know this), which reminded me of the state borders between often warring countries (these are straight lines in all deserts, and where there were wars, every kilometer poured sweat with a spatula). This inspired me to the analogy with the battle. I imagined that the cleared territory was my army, which was beating to death with the surrounding enemy — oil paint. And I, the hero commander, threw my troops into battle. Surprisingly, this metaphor allowed me to discover a more efficient way to scrape paint. If I had previously stupidly scrubbed in different directions, trying to expand the front evenly, now I fiercely beat off the islands of paint from the main front, and surrounded them easily coped with them. So I independently discovered gamification and the notion of batch works.')
Sand for SEGA
On another occasion, I decided to make money on a SEGA game console and got a job as a laborer. As part of the assignment, I had to raise a half cubic meter of sand to the fifth floor for a balcony tie. A sand bucket weighs about twelve kilograms, and there are fifty such buckets in a half-cubometer of sand. Two buckets at a time - twenty-five visits. Thin hands began to hurt after the third time, which is 12% of the work. Then I mentally disassembled my ultimate goal - segu - into parts and roughly estimated how each of the approaches influences the achievement of the goal. For example, pouring out the sand and going down for the next batch, I thought: “Here, I already earned the power button,” “Here and our joystick, we go for the cord!”. And I went down for the next batch with enthusiasm. So I independently discovered the influence of dopamine and norepinephrine on the mood and physical well-being. Oh yeah, segu, in the end, I bought and defeated Shao Kahn, even Sonia.Definition of motivation
The word "motivation" of the whole (as if there may be non-whole!) Has four meanings, some of which it inherits from the word "motivation". Here they are:- The process of arguing, explaining or justifying any action.
- A set of arguments to justify something.
- Psychophysiological signal that causes excitation of the brain and encourages animals, humans to meet their needs.
- Word connection between words
Why do you need motivation
In simple terms, employee motivation is needed so that the work process does not fade. If employees have no motivation, then the initiative of the project manager, expressed in the form of periodic kicks, is the only driving force that ensures the project’s progress. Movement is unavailable, and impetuous, diluted by periodic regressions. If an unmotivated employee is not completely clear in the task, he will think out and do as he understood. If an unmotivated employee doesn’t have any tasks, he will go about his business and wait until the manager himself gets the job done. An unmotivated employee completely gives the manager the initiative, and with it the responsibility for the final result. The lack of motivation from the point of view of the manager resembles an Italian strike - everyone formally does what they are told, and therefore the work efficiency tends to zero.The reason for the degradation of efficiency lies in the fact that a high degree of uncertainty is inherent in the IT sphere itself, which requires a high degree of intellectual involvement from an employee, whether project or operational. Do not think that motivation is needed only in the field of IT. By no means. In any field, motivation increases labor efficiency, and my examples with a spatula and sand prove this. Just in IT, employee motivation changes the efficiency of work by orders of magnitude. The proof of this thesis is a topic for a separate article, so we will not focus on this here.
So, motivated employees are a means of saving project resources, such as the time and effort of a project manager. Unmotivated employees have to drive like a shepherd to avoid wandering, motivated employees can be led like the leader of a wolf pack.
What is motivation?
In this article, we will call the emotional and psychological state of an employee motivation, which, when setting a task, allows you to receive more energy from him than invested in bringing it to him.
This definition provides the life of the running processes, not letting them fade away. In a sense, this definition is equivalent to the definition of engagement of users who provide viral marketing of the product. And this is not surprising. User involvement is based on the same cognitive mechanisms as employee motivation, and the marketing company is similar to collective project creativity.
This definition also shows why, in the absence of motivation (or at low rates of it), the project needs periodic injection of energy in the form of kicks and so beloved by all employees questions "well, how is the task there?". If you ride a bike, you need to pedal all the time. By car, you can press the pedal once, and she herself will get lucky. Motivation, by the way, is etymologically and goes back to the Latin verb moveo, meaning “to move” (compare with English move).
Anatomy of motivation
Since we have defined motivation as an emotional and psychological state, let's see how the motivation is provided by the brain. By the way, due to the incorrect interpretation of the word “motivation” (namely, as the meaning of (1)), it seems to many that motivation is a conscious process based on correctly chosen words. Many managers like to collect motivational meetings and broadcast on them in a rather monotonous manner, which at the second meeting is announced by employees as “bulshitting” (nonsense), and begins to de-motivate more than if it were not. A fairly common pattern is that we are the best, but we have to work even more to be even better. Even if such words motivate someone, this is not the kind of motivation that we are talking about. The mechanisms of brain functioning themselves cannot, on the basis of a quarterly repeated spell, that we are the best, but we must be even better, to ensure the flow of cognitive energy. The brain works differently.Brain motivation
The need-information theory asserts that before taking any action, the brain predicts the expected result exactly as the probability of achieving it and, having performed the action, compares the actual result with the predicted one. We are talking about any action - absolutely any. Even sending a blink signal to the eyes, the brain predicts a neural signal from the age of "we are closed" and "we are open." Watching a moving object, the brain predicts its next position, and expects the retina to confirm its hypothesis. In a sense, the brain lives in perpetual TDD - the expected result is announced, the action is performed, and the expectations are met with reality.When expectations coincide with reality, the brain rewards itself with the release of dopamine , a neurotransmitter responsible for securing a positive human experience. For example, dopamine is actively released during sex and eating delicious food. In a sense, dopamine is the chemistry that is responsible for happiness. In the same sense, the brain is happy when it does not make mistakes.
The more data the brain has about the results of the upcoming action, the more accurately it builds a forecast. The lower the probability of achieving a prediction as a result of the action being performed, the more dopamine is secreted by the brain in order to “mark a successful release.” Thus, the accumulated experience improves the accuracy of predictions, reducing the improbability of success, giving the committed action a hue of despondency. It is on this formula that the routine is based - repetitive actions offer no challenges to the brain, so it takes a dopamine diet.
Conclusions from the anatomy of motivation
If the brain has a lot of data on the upcoming task, then the probability of reaching the forecast is high, so the brain receives little pleasure. However, if there is too little data or not at all, then the brain will not be able to build an achievable forecast and the action itself will be ineffective from his point of view. This is a condition called “doing, I don’t know what”. In this state, dopamine is not produced at all, and the brain works in / dev / null. Such activities are even more dismal than a good routine, in which the brain periodically checks that the world is still as it should be. The lack of information in the formulation of the problem is the best way to prevent the employee from it.However, this is only the first part. After the action is complete, it is vital for the brain to know where the resources that it has invested are spent. If this information is hidden from the brain, he is just as disappointed as if he didn’t know what to expect. Feedback is a vital mechanism for increasing motivation. Not just the connection itself, but also the timeliness of it. There are even mechanisms in the brain that replace the perception of time in order to provide a motor causal connection. That is why working with a decelerating application that asynchronously responds to actions, so infuriates users - the feedback is violated, closing the motivational cycle.
Motivation as a process
So, we have defined motivation as a mental state, but by itself it will start in the brain of workers either by chance or if they instill it themselves. As a rule, self-motivated employees linger in the project for a short time and motivate themselves for more ambitious tasks, so both phenomena in the project are rather rare. Thus, if the project manager needs motivation, he must develop it himself. The word "if" in the previous sentence is not a rhetorical device. Before embarking on the development of motivation, the manager must honestly answer the question whether he really needs it. It so happened that “motivation” is one of the buzzwords with which managers rush to endow their project, although they understand the advantages and the cost of this phenomenon rather vaguely. Motivation is a subtle and well-balanced matter, the maintenance of which can turn the process upside down, depriving the manager of his usual rights and methods. Product development is possible without the motivation of employees - if motivation is not a priority, you need to honestly admit it and not torture yourself or your employees, saving energy for life-giving kicks.Formula of motivation
Motivation in the project is provided by the following formula:Any action taken by staff within a project should have the following three components:
- Task setting context
- Formulation of the problem
- The fastest possible feedback on the integration of results with the project
Task context
Context is the very information that gives the brain the opportunity to build a forecast about the expected result. Having no context, the brain considers the proposed action to be meaningless and does not provide it with motivational support. Describing the context, you yourself let the employee's brain down to determine the need for the upcoming task. And if the context is defined correctly, and the brain has built exactly that prediction about the expected result, which corresponds to the task, this is not your task anymore - this is the task of the employee's brain. You involved the brain and handed the task over to him. Owning the task, to which the brain thought of itself , he has responsibility for it. The brain achieves only its goals. Achieving someone else's goal is considered by the brain as exploitation. That is why it is important that the brain creates this goal itself.It is important to understand that bringing the task context is not a formal process, and it is not necessary to conduct a confidential conversation with an employee before each task. If the context is clear based on past experience, the brain will build a goal without suggestion or persuasion. Therefore, to save energy on the introduction into the context of the task, it is important to build the process so that the completion of one task is the context for the subsequent one - then you can save on introductory conversations. However, if there is no certainty about the context, you cannot save money on a conversation under any circumstances - otherwise you can forget about the personal responsibility of the employee for the work.
Formulation of the problem
If the context of the task is communicated correctly, this step is a formality. But the formality is mandatory. After all, the brain that built the forecast decided the subtask for predicting the expected result, and it needs confirmation. Having formulated the formulation of the problem, you confirm the hypothesis of the brain, forcing him to develop dopamine - the employee is happy that he received exactly the task he wanted. And he wanted it himself - after all, it was his brain that discovered the need to do what is missing.Setting a task is not necessarily expressed by your wording to the employee. Best of all, when an employee himself formulates the task that he understood, and you agree with her. I had a manager (the best in the world!) Who never said what needs to be done. He just started talking about the project until you yourself said that you should do this, this and that. Then he said - oh fine, will you? How not to do something after this? Note that this approach also ensures that the task is understood correctly. The answer “aha”, expressed as a result of familiarization with the wording of the task, does not mean that the person understood exactly what is written there.
Feedback
Having correctly received the task, the employee lights up with motivation and rushes to do it. As a rule, a motivated employee copes well with her, so that she successfully integrates with the project. This is where the time comes for the main mistake that most managers make - success does not reach the employee. What for? The task is done, it is time to move on to the next one. Recall the brain motivation cycle and note that, having completed a task, the brain is waiting for confirmation of its hypothesis. Yes, he understood the task correctly, and you confirmed this hypothesis at the stage of setting, but he also coped with this task! How can he understand that what he has done really corresponds to his ideas about real expectations? The argument that “if there were problems, it would be addressed” does not work. UNIX commands keep silent, if everything is fine, and swear when an error occurs. The brain needs explicit confirmation. Even deciding to blink, he expects a clear signal that the blinking has happened. Thus, logical calculations and conventions do not work. If, after completing the task, the brain did not receive an explicit confirmation of success, he believes that the effort has been wasted, which is especially disappointing when you consider how inspired he was with her.That is why feedback is an ongoing process. This is not an annual (yes at least quarterly) conversation on certification in the style of "you are well done! Keep it up!". How to hold? Again, the feedback does not have to be verbal. After each successful assembly, it is not necessary to resort to the employees, to shake their hands and kiss on the cheek. It is enough for a person to see where his work has gone and how it merged with the overall project. See clearly, without additional effort. Determining that the task is completed successfully should not be a source for another task, so that excuses such as “let them open the bugtracker and look for” are not rolled. The work process should be visualized, easily accessible and visual. The completed task should itself return the feedback to the employee, showing that he is consonant with the project, and that his ideas of beauty correspond to the ideas of the project as a whole.
Motivation levels
Motivation is a multi-level concept. Even for blinking, the brain needs motivation, not to mention the motivation to get involved in semi-annual projects. As actions are invested in each other, so are motivations. The motivation to talk with a colleague is invested in motivation to better understand the task that is invested in motivation to qualitatively cope with the functionality for which you are responsible, which in turn is part of the motivation on time and in proper quality to release the product. The lower levels of motivation are necessary for the existence of the upper, but the upper levels also support the lower ones. For example, if you like a product, it gives you an extra reason to take care of the quality of the task, even if you don’t like it. After all, it is needed for dear to the heart (brain) purpose. And the brain is able to endure the inconvenience, if you know why it is needed.From all this variety of motivations we isolate two levels that are most important for building a process of motivated development.
Task motivation
Motivation at the task level is the motivation to do this task whole-heartedly, to mobilize all the emotional and intellectual efforts for it, since it seems absolutely necessary at the moment. To achieve the objective motivation, you need a competent introduction to the context and the formulation of the problem . Without them, the task is non-native, it is done carelessly, and the responsibility for it is borne by "this manager." If an employee works on a task without a fire in his eyes, most likely, he does not have a task motivation.Motivation for the project
This level of motivation allows you to work with enthusiasm even on tedious (i.e., tasks with a high probability of success attainable) tasks with enthusiasm for the sake of moving towards a higher order task - the successful completion of the project. This level is strongly influenced by feedback , which shows the degree of approach to the final desired goal, turning the completed uninteresting task into a positive experience, which is also washed with dopamine in the brain. If you do not show how the completed task affected the project as a whole, no matter how interesting it is, the employee will have a sense of exploitation, because the best impulses of his soul merge into a black hole of uncertainty. Even if an employee enjoys his own productivity, impersonal tasks without a global sense of moving forward create a sense of routine that is inherent in most large organizations. Feedback is the secret that closes the cycle of project motivation, turning employees into fighters.Motivation with bucket and spatula
Now that we know how motivation works, let us try to understand why I had a motivation when I scrubbed the wall and carried buckets of sand.In the case of the wall, I had no task motivation, since the actions of my brain did not affect the achievement of the goal. Having learned how to scrape paint, my brain raised its experience to a level where its predictions about the success of the spatula motion coincided 100% with the result, so the routine began to depress it. When I came up with the “surround and destroy” game, each new environment offered the brain a new task that it had not yet solved, so it was interesting for him to solve the optimal strategy of environment and annihilation every time, depending on the topography. As a result, the brain received a bunch of interesting tasks, which it was interesting to solve even in isolation from the context, for the sake of which it does it. I could scrape the paint off this method even from the Great Wall of China, but the brain would all play like the brain of an avid gamer.
In the case of sand buckets, the task was uninteresting and uncomfortable by definition - dragging 24 kg of sand to the fifth floor has a minimum level of uncertainty and a maximum level of discomfort. However, having presented the goal, segu, I endowed each of the uninteresting tasks with a fictional reward, showing my progress towards the final goal. Even though it was self-hypnosis, the brain endowed each of the actions with a hypothesis, which he had no reason to refute. Therefore, he was filled with happiness, dopamine after each rise. And not only this. He also anticipated happiness on the rise, but what is happiness, if not anticipation of happiness?
What is not a working motivation?
In conclusion, I would like to debunk some statements about the motivation that I had to meet. Namely, that the main and only means of motivation is money. Money can be a motivation, but only if it is an indicator of the success of the efforts made - it doesn’t matter to the brain how to determine that its efforts have reached the goal. The entrepreneur is motivated by the money that came back as a result of his marketing campaign. An employee who receives money on a piece-rate basis can be motivated by considering the money as an act of confirming a completed contract. But the money twice a month transferred to the account, and ringing around the office sms, can not be motivated, because the brain is not visible correlation between their efforts and autonomous process of money transfer. If someone wants to motivate employees with money, he has to provide payments for each task, which converts money into a kind of feedback, fitting into the process described above. Exactly for the same reason, any unreasonable buns, cookies, sweets and corporate parties cannot be motivated. The only thing that motivates these awards is to strive for the same awards.Often, motivation is considered a fiery speech at a meeting, especially if the speaker has the gift of a speaker. Who, listening to the speech of William Wallace before the battle of Stirling in “Brave Heart”, does not feel in himself the strength to rush into battle? Who, listening to the speech of King Theoden before attacking the army of Mordor, is not ready to shout "To death!" And rush to drown the reptiles? What is this if not motivation? Yes, this is motivation, but if you look closely, it all happens before the battle. On this motivation, you can leave the battle, but on such a motivation not to win the war. In our terminology, this is a task motivation, but it will quickly fade away if it is not supported by feedback after the heated wars come out of battle.
The only thing that gives motivation to work is properly organized work.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/218561/
All Articles