Good managers know it’s not all about the money

“You want to know why those engineers and astronauts reached new heights of performance? It’s simple: They were going to the moon.” – from Motivate Your Staff Without Money

When Charles Garfield led NASA engineers on the Apollo project in the late sixties, he found that employees—even merely so-so ones—were raising their game to new levels to get the work done. Yet no one had dangled a financial reward for landing on the moon, so what was going on? And why did performance seem to level off after history had been made?

Morey Stettner, editor of Executive Leadership, recently described for webinar attendees the power of intrinsic motivators to get workers to buy into their jobs in ways a bonus check can’t accomplish. There’s a lot of psychology in play when people sit down at their desks in the morning; learn to wield it to your advantage and you won’t have to constantly buy off staff lethargy.

Getting them to buy into what they do when the coffers are a little low begins with crafting an organizational culture that gives a meaning to everyone’s job—everyone’s. When Morey toiled in the insurance industry out of college, one of his managers would sometimes approach him, glance at what he was doing, and ask, “So is this important to you? Not to the company, but to you?”

“You have to get your whole team enthusiastic about something larger than themselves,” Morey explained. Sometimes this will mean nothing more than explaining how grunt paperwork fits into the bigger company picture. Every day, it means being able to answer each employee’s unspoken question: What am I really affecting here? What if I didn’t come to work tomorrow, or ever again? Would anyone really care?

To that end, Morey likes managers to circulate three questions among their teams—and not just as a one-off exercise:

1. When are you happiest at work?
2. To what extent do you think you make a difference?
3. How do you measure your success at work?

One bargain-basement technique to give people what they desire on the job more than money: “Freedom in a box.” Workers derive self-esteem and pride from being able to make independent decisions, and no matter their place in the company, this is something you can give them. For example, you might give customer service associates a finite amount of money to solve any given customer grievance. Suddenly, they possess a little autonomy, and they become self-directed negotiators in action, not just robots.

You don’t have to hand over too much power to make employees stand on top of the world. Let peers host staff meetings—maybe letting others know what they did well recently, and exactly how they nailed it. (“Get ’em to brag,” Morey likes to say.) Opportunities to shine on projects are everywhere you’re forgetting to look—from coaching the company softball team to organizing lunch ‘n’ learns on work topics. What matters is that they’re thrust into positions of authority and are held high as valuable sources of knowledge.

“But all my people do is slave alone over a hot keyboard all day,” you might think. OK, fine. Remember that for every job description, there’s a community of folk out there with the very same one. Connect your employees to it online, Morey instructed, or have them share war stories internally with people whose jobs they affect—anything to make them feel they’re part of a bigger world, a larger cause. Working in a vacuum is a morale killer.

Money will certainly always provide a lift for your staff, Morey told the audience, no question. We live in the real world, after all. A shrewd company, though, resists the urge when the budget swells again after lean times to just throw cash back into all the old perks and think, “That’s the motivator we needed—now we’re off the hook!” Just because the green stuff is back, that doesn’t mean the true motivation is too. That lies on a deeper level, but it doesn’t have to remain a mystery.