Maintain the motivation to Christmas

Maintain the motivation to Christmas

As December rapidly approaches you might start to see things slow down around the office with people’s focus and motivation starting to drop.  Keeping employees motivated is a challenging task at this time of year but it if you can continue to motivate your team through the last few weeks of the year, it can have a marked impact on your company’s performance.  

It is commonly believed that motivation is shaped by rewards and that the bigger the reward, the more motivated your people will be. However, there’s plenty of evidence to challenge this belief. For example, one study gave a group of students a set of challenges and they were rewarded based on their performance. They found that as long as the task involved only mechanical skill (e.g. completing a simple jigsaw puzzle) then rewards worked as expected with larger rewards being more motivating. Surprisingly, however, they found that once the task used even rudimentary cognitive skills (e.g. designing an advert) a larger reward actually led to reduced motivation¹.  Simply trying to motivate employees with rewards may not be enough to keep them going.

So how do you motivate your employees? Drawing on psychological theories can help us identify some effective approaches. Self-determination theory (SDT) provides an excellent framework for understanding how to increase motivation. It explores how we all have innate psychological needs which we are driven to satisfy. We want to continuously learn and grow so when our tasks allow this then we become intrinsically motivated and are driven to complete the task.