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Hellbent

What motivates in the workplace?

Do you agree with the video's hypothesis?  

7 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you agree with the video's hypothesis?

    • My job requires creative, out of the box problem solving and I agree
      4
    • My job requires creative, out of the box problem solving and I disagree
      1
    • My job requires creative, out of the box problem solving and I'm not sure
      2


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What motivates in the workplace?

Extrinsic motivators, bonuses, dangling carrots?

or

Intrinsic motivators, autonomy, mastery and purpose?:

To skip the pointless intro and get right to the video skip to 1:33



Interesting stuff, although I think the speaker is operating under the assumption people in his examples like their jobs. Is this still true if you didn't like your job? There are other videos other than this one discussing this very topic.

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If you have a managerial role, than you have to think out of the box and be creative. I direct my staff, and come up with ways to accomplish various tasks with no clear guide lines a lot of the time. Also, when dealing with other people that present road blocks, you need to be resourceful in facilitating what you have to do. But you can apply that approach to any job really, and come up with more efficient ways of accomplishing tasks.

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Middle management overrates itself. On one hand it happily accepts a priori templates of successful management of any field, on the other it keeps reinventing the wheel in the "out of box" process, because those vague theories don't fit my job managing three cleaning ladies and I have to think for myself. Managing people is part personal charm, part art, part experience, not an exact fucking science, but that realization makes HR specialists sad, so they come up with more bullshit formulas on team leadership to cheer themselves up.

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Jodwin said:

What if my job doesn't require creative, out of box problem solving?

Then, according to this video, you'll be more productive if you're given bonuses and other added monetary incentives.

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Hellbent said:

Then, according to this video, you'll be more productive if you're given bonuses and other added monetary incentives.


What if both are true?

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Hellbent said:

Then, according to this video, you'll be more productive if you're given bonuses and other added monetary incentives.

I was referring to the rather inclusive poll choices. :P

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Maybe a moderator could add to my poll:

  • my job consists of rudimentary tasks, and bonuses and other monetary incentives motivate me to be more productive.

  • my job consists of rudimentary tasks, and bonuses and other monetary incentives don't motivate me to be more productive.

  • my job consists of rudimentary tasks, and I'm not sure if bonuses and other monetary incentives motivate me to be more productive.

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My job as a community manager does involve a lot of "out of the box" solutions to situations. Fortunately we're compensated pretty well and our "management" are there merely to be gurus rather than "boss." Pretty good arrangement. Productivity really fluctuates, though. There are days where we've got our eyes on the price and tear through our work, and others where it just seems to drag on and all of us lag behind. I wonder if there's a way I can study what factors into what causes our productivity to waver so much.

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Hellbent said:

Interesting stuff, although I think the speaker is operating under the assumption people in his examples like their jobs. Is this still true if you didn't like your job? There are other videos other than this one discussing this very topic.

I don't particularly 'enjoy' my current job in a sense, but it allows me a certain amount of freedom and autonomy I actually really like, which is the reason I've been doing it for over 10 years. Normal people want to do productive and meaningful work because accomplishing things and getting stuff done feels good.

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a friend of mine was at a Tesco staff meeting. The usual management bullshit speech. Productivity down blah blah profit margins in the shitter blah blah blah We need to think outside the Tesco box!

Silence fell upon the room. One man, perhaps louder than he intended, muttered, "That will be Asda then."



the moral of the story is that genius is not rewarded on the shop floor level.

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Nothing motivates in the workplace more than needing that paycheck to pay the bills at the end of the month, and realizing that there is a -figurative or literal- queue of super-motivated candidates ready to take your place in the blink of an eye.

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j4rio said:

Work is the most desperate way to get money.


Perhaps you mean dependent/salaried work. Some groups of people (e.g. Gypsies) consider this type of work the most demeaning, because the idea of being dependent on somebody else's whims is intolerable for them -and I can see their point, there. Doing legal business is also considered too demeaning, as it merely means replacing a private boss with a public one (the state) and a thousand of petty regulations and rules they can't be assed with (they also prefer minimizing their direct interactions with the State).

So in general, they end up doing unofficial "work" that's either illegal (though they try to moderate risk and consequences with other means), or which is actually quite hard, risky and time consuming (e.g. scrap scavenging, smuggling, carnivals etc.).

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Money is good, but boredom motivates me more than anything on a day-to-day basis. If I'm not productive, if I'm not working hard, then I have nothing to do and the day drags by painfully slowly. If I had to come in every day and do nothing, it wouldn't matter how much I made, I'd still dread getting out of bed in the morning.

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geekmarine said:

If I had to come in every day and do nothing, it wouldn't matter how much I made, I'd still dread getting out of bed in the morning.


You have not been spoiled and financially exposed enough, that's why you still have this idealistic outlook on the "virtue of work".

Let's see if you'd still "feel bad" about having a sinecure if you also had kids and had to pay the mortgage on your house at the end of every month. Would "work virtue" and "personal growth" beat work security then?

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While working in a call centre a few years ago, I volunteered to test out of the new VOIP lines. I found out from the tech people that our QA department couldn't monitor these new lines, so they had no way of knowing how many calls I took. I also got a nice little corner cubicle that had its back to the wall, so no one could sneak up behind me.

I played so much fucking Bejewelled, Turok, Doom; you name it. Sometimes I would pretend to be on a call, but at one stretch I think I went a whole month without doing any actual work. I'd usually pitch in when the lines got busy, but that was it.

At first it was a dream - getting payed to surf the internet. But I eventually grew bored and started working again.

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere, I dunno.

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Maes said:

You have not been spoiled and financially exposed enough, that's why you still have this idealistic outlook on the "virtue of work".

Let's see if you'd still "feel bad" about having a sinecure if you also had kids and had to pay the mortgage on your house at the end of every month. Would "work virtue" and "personal growth" beat work security then?

I'm not being idealistic. I'm not saying I'd screw myself over for my values. I simply said I'd be fucking miserable. Yes, it's important to be able to pay the bills - I'm all too familiar with that. However, I'm simply saying I wouldn't feel terribly motivated about my job if nothing about it was enjoyable. Happiness is part of the equation, after all. If your life is terrible, how motivated can you possibly be? How much money does it take to make you forget that you're unhappy?

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Watched the video. Even Doomworld would have made an awesome example of his Encarta versus Wikipedia comparison. Just look at all the awesome wads we have, all with such diverse and interesting concepts, all done completely for free and out of passion for the game.

He didn't quite sell me at the end when he said he didn't believe this sounded too utopian. In the food service industry, there are enough people who are capable of brilliant things, but elsewhere, there aren't enough who are passionate and enthusiastic about preparing food for people for years on end. There's a point in pretty much everyone's lives (that probably comes within the first couple minutes of preparing a meal that you're not going to eat) where you'd MUCH rather be doing something else, but food service is a $400 billion industry that is just about equal to the amount spent at grocery stores (money spent for food people would make for themselves)

I think it's a little late to reverse that; meaning that everyone would have to learn that no one wants to cook for them and they will have to make their own food themselves because all the fast food wage slaves wanted to make art or develop software and information technology or whatever they felt was more important.

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geekmarine said:

How much money does it take to make you forget that you're unhappy?


How about just enough to pay all your bills and maybe buy you enough booze to pull through?

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Maes said:

How about just enough to pay all your bills and maybe buy you enough booze to pull through?

this is exactly how I live my life, and I am the fucking happiest little snowflake.

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darknation said:

this is exactly how I live my life, and I am the fucking happiest little snowflake.


This right here. Plus a college loan and classes Im taking, but I did that to my self and it's part of my bills, which I am able to pay by and by with my current jobs. So regardless, I know where I stand, nd I am happy with it. I want more once I am done with school, but if I can make ends meet, get myself a small ass room at expensive rates and pay for it on my own, that's my motivation right there.

And the booze. Definitely the booze on some nights.

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What dn and Maes said.

"Enough money", not "money" in itself.

I had a job that let me do what I enjoyed without the pressure of strict deadlines and where I could set my own goals to some extent. I could also save around a quarter of my monthly salary easily, even half of it if I sacrificed some things.

Switched to a better paying one a year ago where I thought I'd be doing more or less the same thing and now I'm thinking of quitting as I just can't stand the shit I have to put up with and I'm beginning to notice the impact on my personal life. The 40% raise was definitely not worth it. Back then I also saw it as an "opportunity" for "personal improvement" and "new experience", which turned out to be idealistic nonsense as well.

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