More Than a Paycheck

By PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON | Wall Street Journal |Feb 5, 2010

Workers are more efficient, loyal and creative when they feel a sense of purpose-when work has meaning.

Daniel
Pink is one of the more energetic members of the growing tribe of
business writers-speakers-bloggers who, like the ubiquitous Malcolm
Gladwell, plunder the work of economists, scientists and psychologists
to attack well-established business assumptions. Mr. Pink is known for
public presentations in which he delivers a consistently upbeat
message: that the miserable age of 20th-century management is over,
that the tyranny of organizational charts and spreadsheets is behind
us, and that we are now entering more sun-splashed climes, where
creativity flourishes and businesses treat employees as human beings,
not machine parts.

It is a message we would all love to believe. With "Drive: The
Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," Mr. Pink tries to jolly us
all along toward accepting it. He sets up the following history. First
came Motivation 1.0, during which we were stirred by nothing but our
urges-grunting, hunting and procreating in caves. Next came Motivation
2.0, during which we made calculations based on reward or punishment.
Economic development depended on manipulating our desires and fears to
extract performance. Carrots and sticks were the tools of this
motivational operating system.

And now we are reaching Motivation 3.0, a higher plane where people
write Wikipedia entries for the fun of it, go on "vocation vacations"
to try out professions different from their own, and spend a lot of
time thinking about the purpose of their work. Science, Mr. Pink says,
has shown that we are motivated as much intrinsically, by the sheer joy
and purpose of certain activities, as extrinsically, by rewards like
pay raises and promotions.

The science that Mr. Pink is referring to rests largely on the work
of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester and
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University. These three
researchers have found that we do our best work when motivated from
within, when we have control over our time and decisions and when we
feel a deep sense of purpose. Under such conditions, we can achieve
real mastery over whatever it is that we do.

The modern workplace, Mr. Pink laments, is too often set up to deny
us this opportunity. Firms that hope to optimize efficiency by making
their employees clock in and out, attend compulsory meetings, and
receive pay for performance are de-motivating through excessive
control. What they should be doing, he argues, is giving workers the
chance to do their best work by granting them more autonomy and helping
them to achieve the mastery that may come with it.

Mr. Pink cites an Australian software firm, Atlassian, that allows
its programmers 20% of their time to work on any software problem they
like, provided it is not part of their regular job. The programmers
turn out to be much more efficient with that 20% of their time than
they are with their regular work hours. Atlassian credits the 20% with
many of its innovations and its high staff retention. Companies as
large as Google and 3M have similar programs that have produced
everything from Google News to the Post-It note.

View Full Image

Drive

By Daniel H. Pink


Riverhead, 242 pages, $26.95

Relatedly,
Best Buy has implemented a "results oriented work environment" at its
corporate headquarters in Richfield, Minn., to improve morale and lower
turnover. This means that salaried employees put in as much time as it
takes to do their jobs, on their own schedule. If they need to duck out
to take a child to the doctor, they don't have to ask. It is assumed
that they will do their work in their own time. The hope is that, in
such an environment, workers will feel more inclined to contribute to
the company's well-being than they would if they were simply grinding
out hours for a paycheck.

And then there are "low-profit limited liability corporations,"
for-profit businesses whose main goal is offering social benefits-for
instance, buying old furniture factories, making them environmentally
friendly, and then leasing them back cheaply to hard-up furniture
makers.

From these and other scattered data points, Mr. Pink rustles up his
trend. Is it plausible? It is easy to find fault with some of his
claims. Mr. Pink cites research showing that artists do better work for
themselves than on commission. So much for the Sistine Chapel. He
writes in favor of companies that allow employees more say in their
firms' charitable giving. But why don't these firms drop the
paternalism altogether and simply give the money to their employees as
pay, trusting them to do their best with it? And one has to wonder
whether Mr. Pink's flexible, meaningful-work model is widely applicable
or something that only selected companies will be able to adopt.

What is more, the truths that Mr. Pink cites are not nearly as
"surprising" as he claims. They are to be found in centuries of
philosophy, in the Pre-Socratics, in Plato, in "Walden." Yes, indeed:
Beyond serving our basic needs, money doesn't buy happiness. We need a
greater purpose in our lives. Our most precious resource is time. We
respond badly to conditions of servitude, whether the lash of the
galley master or the more subtle enslavement of monthly paychecks,
quarterly performance targets and the fear of losing health insurance.
Work that allows us to feel in control of our lives is better than work
that does not. Nonetheless, these lessons are worth repeating, and if
more companies feel emboldened to follow Mr. Pink's advice, then so
much the better.

Mr. Delves Broughton is the author of "Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School" (Penguin).