THE BENEFITS

How do you manage to motivate your employees when they are working from home over a longer period of time? Certainly, many managers deal with his question at the moment. Depending on the task type, Daniel Pink’s DRIVE model describes different ways of motivating employees (#21). If you need your employees to be creative and innovative and approach tasks actively, a reward system won’t be very helpful. In this hack we show you how you can give orientation to your employees by giving them a purpose.

HOW IT’S DONE

The first step to figure out your motives is self-reflection. What drives you? Is it the desire for security, insecurity (because security is too boring in the long run and you are looking for the thrill) or to be meaningful? Behind these apparent motives lies the driving force of fear. The main reason to work is security. Once we have achieved this, we start to seek challenges that free us from too much security. And then we strive for significance, we want to „be someone“. Status symbols gain importance now: the company car, the bigger office, the epaulettes.

As said before, behind these three levels lies the driver of fear. Fear that life is not safe. Fear that life is boring. Fear of not being worth nothing in the eyes of others (Dieter Lange).

These three levels are about being faster, higher, better.

At this point, however, many people realize, that „there must be more“. They undergo some kind of transformation – towards inner growth, contribution and being human. The motto is that giving is happier than taking. It is a matter of wanting to make a positive contribution, leaving a mark and doing something for the sake of doing it.

If you reach this stage, which is driven by love, the route becomes the destination. You’ll convey meaning not in a superior framework of action but by showing your team how you grow yourself with your tasks and what contributions you are willing to make for a world in which you want to live.

The sense and purpose of every success is: to grow and contribute. Or in other words: to grow by your tasks and to contribute to a world in which you want to live in.

PLEASE CONSIDER

Take time to become aware of your own inner drives. We live in a culture of “higher, further, more” and hardly question these mechanisms. Maybe in some quiet moments you secretly do question this and you are searching for something else.

Work out as a team: What should our purpose be, what do we as a team want to stand for? This process will weld you together as a team and you will get coherent ideas for your purpose.