Remote Work And Motivation

Daniel Pink authored a fantastic book titled Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us approximately ten years ago. Check out an interview with him where he discusses his findings 10 years on here.

We shouldn’t frame remote work as a binary choice.

- Daniel Pink

Today we’ll focus on this snippet:

Sarah: Speaking of productively subversive, let’s round this out by talking about remote work, which is being driven underground in some places. On one hand, we have big-name companies making headlines because they’ve banned remote work, at least “officially”. But then other companies are embracing it to the point of being remote-only. How is this tug-of-war going to play out? 

Daniel: It’s part of a broader reckoning about many aspects of work, and sometimes we go too far to the extreme. For at least one of those big-name companies, banning remote work was an overreaction. They were struggling, and remote was not the culprit. But executives got frustrated and felt the need to change something. 

Getting back to the principles of intrinsic motivation, with remote work, you do have autonomy. You have sovereignty over how you configure your day. That’s really important for doing good work and reducing your stress level. The trick is not to shortchange the other principles. With mastery, you have to make sure remote employees get feedback on how they’re doing so they can get better at their job. With purpose, you have to make sure they understand how their work is making a difference. It’s all possible, it just might be a bit harder in a remote environment.

To me, it’s a matter of each company finding the right balance. We shouldn’t frame remote work as a binary choice.

Drive comes from autonomy, mastery, and purpose. As Daniel Pink notes, all need to be present for maximum intrinsic motivation. Remote work can easily provide autonomy, but we need to make sure we also support mastery and purpose.

As many of us increase the amount of remote work we do, both in the short term in response to the pandemic, and we suspect in the longer term as many customers continue to desire social distancing, it is important that we embrace the opportunity to not just shift old ways of working in a physical office to the home, but find ways to improve our effectiveness while shifting to remote ways of working.

Remotely,

Joel