[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Can Money Buy Your Productivity?"][/caption]

In True Motivation, my friend Vinny pointed to a very interesting video by Dan Pink, “author of several provocative, bestselling books about the changing world of work.“ This video talks about how research has come up with key factors to make people happier, successful and fulfilled: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose!

Ok, this shouldn’t really shock people, but how about this nice little nugget: when it comes down to tasks that require cognitive skills, offering more money as an incentive does not yield good results! So… given a task where one has to use a bit more of one’s gray matter, offering a bigger reward did not guarantee success! Pretty interesting, huh?

Toward the end of the video, Pink mentions how Atlassian incorporated a process where their employees were give one whole day every quarter where they could work on anything they liked, with whomever they wanted, as long as they showed the result of their work at the end of they day to the rest of the company. Pretty much like a show and tell for professionals, with food and drinks! The results were astonishing! Since they could work on anything they wanted, the majority chose to fix their pet peeves about their own product or to create new, cooler products!

This made me smile as I’m very used to the idea of a show and tell here where I work. At around 16:30 (thanks oot for correcting me) every Friday the entire engineering gang gets together to show off what they worked on during the week, drink their beverage of choice (we even hold beverage elections every other month!) and just catch up with the latest gossip from marketing. :)

Another interesting point: if your employees don’t have to worry about money, they can better focus on their work! I’m not saying that good employees should be “bought”, but oftentimes people will leave a company if they can’t make ends meet with their salary. It is not being a mercenary but a reality of life!

Though his post is about contrasting these 3 factors against what he calls “independent travel”, I feel that video can be really useful for managers who want to motivate and improve the environment of their workspace! Go check it out!