The Movable Middle
Many leaders are challenged with improving business performance by increasing their collective team members’ productivity. Where is the best place to focus? Intuition typically points to either the bottom or top performers. It makes sense, your bottom performers have the most room for improvement and your “Stars” are usually where we focus when we need […]
Contact Center Case Study
Not so fast! Why WFH is not necessarily a great new paradigm
It was inevitable. Enterprising managers would notice some of the benefits of a work from home (WFH) team and declare it the “New Paradigm” going forward. I’ll admit it is tantalizing – greater productivity, lower travel costs, higher morale, lower turnover, a much larger candidate pool that is unrestrained by geography, reduced real estate expense, […]
Managing and Metrics (with a Tiger Analogy)
If you are a manager and you are freaking out right now because you can’t see what your working-from-home team is doing, it may have nothing to with remote workers and everything to do with how you manage performance data. The current anxiety is the overdue result of two critical failures relating to performance data […]
See and Be Seen – The impact of “work visibility” on remote productivity
This article was originally posted on propertycasualty360.com. Read original article. I’m a work-from-home veteran; I’ve been working from home for about a decade. Are people more orless productive when they work remotely? Like most things in life, it depends. It depends upon a lot ofthings including: The kind of work to be done Degree of […]
Progress: I’m on my way!
The intrinsic motivator of Progress is all about movement. Promising Career Unpromising Career “He’s getting ahead” “I’m stuck, there’s nowhere else to go here” “She’s shooting straight to the top” “It’s a dead-end job” “It’s got a lot of upward mobility” “She’s trapped and needs to quit” “He’s moving up, no doubt” “He’s in a […]
Gamification
What is it? Gamification is often defined as “using game-like mechanics such as points, scoring, and competitions in a non-game setting”. This is a pretty dry description for a word that contains “game” within it. I take a slightly more nuanced perspective in that the game mechanics are merely a means of triggering the underlying […]
Contribution – my team needs me
Next up on our round-the-mind tour of intrinsic motivators – Contribution. We are social creatures who thrive in an environment in which we can interact with others in a group. Numerous studies have shown that some of the happiest and longest-lived people in the world are those with deep social connections and relationships. Heck, even […]
Mastery – I’m good at my job and getting better
The intrinsic motivator of Mastery relates to our desire to be awesome at something. It feels good to know that you are a “rock star” at a skill. But it’s not just about being good, it’s about continuously getting better. Intrinsic motivators like mastery are really a recipe for what makes us happy. While most […]
A Fish Story
Extrinsic and intrinsic motivators appear to be contradictory of one another. Extrinsic motivators are tangible, controlled by a third party, and are not directly connected to the work itself. On the other hand, intrinsic motivators are intangible, originate from within a person, and are directly connected to the work. But is it possible that one […]
