What Motivates People at Work?

Here at Attuned we have motivational data from thousands and thousands of working people. Every human being has a unique motivational profile that consists of 11 intrinsic motivators. In case you didn’t know, intrinsic motivation is what really matters for workplace motivation. Compared to extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation actually helps to boost employee morale. Applied correctly, intrinsic motivation will lead to happy employees.

You can read more about the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation here.

We wanted to find out what motivates people at work and so we analyzed the motivational data of thousands of Attuned survey respondents to answer two questions:

1. “Which of the motivators are most likely to be neutral?”

2. “What of the 11 intrinsic motivators has the highest frequency of 0%?”

The data returned was not what I expected, and not what most people might expect to motivate their organizations. Let’s break down some of the results.

The motivators most likely to be neutral were “Autonomy“, “Social Relationships“, “Rationality“, “Feedback“ and “Financial Needs”. Just to set one thing straight, if someone has a neutral score for “Autonomy“, it doesn’t mean that person is not autonomous or can’t work autonomously. It simply means that “Autonomy“ doesn’t have an impact on someone’s motivation at work. In other words, for that person it doesn’t matter if she has autonomy at work or not. It won’t change her workplace motivation.

Let’s get back to the results. I think the most interesting finding from our first question is that over 40% of all employees don’t care about “Social Relationships“ at work. This is surprising since a vast majority of our Attuned Motivator Assessment respondents are company employees and therefore interact with other people at work. But data doesn’t lie, it seems like less people than I expected are motivated by “Social Relationships“. This means that they can work from home alone all day and it won’t have any negative effects on their motivation. These are probably the employees best suited for remote work.

Another surprise was that over 1/3 of all respondents are not motivated by “Financial Needs“. For them money doesn’t have a motivating effect. So if you are trying to motivate your team by offering some kind of monetary incentive, go back to the lab and re-think that approach. It won’t work for everybody.

Here is another article about how intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives affect workplace performance.

For this question I wanted to see the extreme. How many people have a score of 0% for a certain motivator? Our motivational data showed that “Competition“, “Status“, “Financial Needs“, “Autonomy“ and “Rationality“ are the motivators most often to be 0%.

To my surprise, “Competition“ was the highest with 7%, meaning that 7% of all our respondents have a motivational score for “Competition” of 0%. Those 7% are not motivated by “Competition“ at all. This is even more surprising when you look at how many people are actually motivated by “Competition“. For that you can see that over 75% of our respondents have “Competition“ as a “Nice-to-Have“ or “Need-to-Have“ motivator. in short, 3/4 of all employees need some “Competition“ at work to feel motivated.

Have a good look at the infographic and share it around. Let’s set some misconceptions about employee motivation straight, through real data about employee’s intrinsic motivation. Don’t forget, a motivated employee is a happy employee and a happy employee is a productive employee.

Help us to make work more meaningful.