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"RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

More on Dan Pink and his writings: https://www.danpink.com/about/

Alfie Kohn also writes on the topic of intrinsic motivation
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
https://www.alfiekohn.org/puni...

I put together a reading list of related ideas here:
"High Performance Organizations Reading List"
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

Of course, appropriate compensation is important in a society like the USA that has so many exchange transactions (as opposed to subsistence, gift, and planned transactions). Like Dan Pink says, people need to be paid enough to "take money off the table" as an issue. And for some people who like to work independently, saving up money is a way to buy their own time to work on things they care about.

But once money is off the table, these sorts of non-monetary issues affect productivity:
* Purpose (Finding meaning in what you do in how it affects people and the rest of the world)
* Autonomy (being able to make decisions about what you do and how you do it)
* Mastery (personal growth in technical skills and other areas)
* Community
* Infrastructure

Dan Pink talks about the first three in the video above.

Community is related to shared purpose, but I feel is a different thing in itself about how people relate to each other and have fun together. While I feel it problematical to ask employees to travel long distances for special events or to give up evenings or weekends for "team building exercises", a company that uses some of the work day to build community is likely making a good investment. Those can be relatively simple things like lunch-and-learns, holiday parties in the late afternoon, special lunches with invited guests, and so on. Even something like a regular "all hands" meeting to discuss what is going on in the company can help build community. Enjoyable training sessions like using appropriate humor in communications could also help. Even just starting voice or video chats ten minutes before the appointed time so people who show up early can chat briefly about stuff they are doing outside of work can make a difference. But community is not any one thing -- it is about the whole as a culture and also strengthening many individual one-to-one relationships.

Infrastructure overlaps with "Autonomy" to an extent -- but larger organizational choices can make a big difference for software developers; for example:

* The process choices -- e.g. see David Thomas on moving beyond "Agile" to "Agility"

* The tool/language/library choices -- e.g. in the web space there are so many poorly thought out overly-complex systems being adopted like Angular from big-name herd effects. Contrast such overly-complex systems with the idea of simplicity like in "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey (developer of Clojure) or ideas by Chuck Moore (developer of Forth) or by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls (with Smalltalk) or Leo Horie (with Mithril.js/HyperScript) and Adam Morse (with Tachyons.css). You don't have to use these specific languages or libraries to learn to appreciate things from the perspective of appropriate simplicity as the ultimate elegance, which can then be applied to whatever you are stuck with for legacy reasons.

* Having the appropriate tools you need to do your job (e.g. adequate computing, adequate displays, an appropriate workspace, good audio/visual communications, etc.)

And of course the specific relation an employee has with a manager makes a huge difference, given it is often said people

That's pretty much it. According to Daniel H. Pink, (author of Drive) these types of systems can actually make work less fulfilling in the long run and can actually interfere with the proper performance of any job involving thought. They're pretty good at motivating repetitious tasks (like factory work), however, for work that involves creativity, the rewards can actually reduce quality and productivity by focus the employees on earning the points instead of doing the work. The book mostly deals with monetary rewards, but I think a known point system is fairly similar to monetary awards. Although, I suppose the points might be less desirable and thus burn out the employees a little slower than the cash rewards do.

It took me only a few minutes to light this candle, I hope it helped you more than cursing the darkness.

P.S. I do not know or work for Dan Pink, have never seen him speak in person, and I can't personally endorse his message... but I thought the animation interesting enough to go look up his talk on RSA, which wasn't difficult. I hope it helped.

According to Daniel Pink, who wrote the book (Drive) on motivation, that's not a great idea either. According to a number of scientific experiments conducted on motivation, performance incentives cause people to work harder, but less efficiently. Additionally, once the incentive is removed, the employees motivation and enjoyment of the job has been permanently reduced.

Of course, if a company is hiring PIs to follow employees around, most likely everyone hates the company and hates working there already.

As a starting point, I'd like to suggest designers read, "A Whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink, and check out some articles at: http://www.danpink.com/. Furthermore, I suggest visiting IDEO http://www.ideo.com/ideo.asp. Pay special attention to their "method card" deck. Lastly (for purposes of this discussion) I suggest visiting http://www.mcdonough.com/# . The common thread in all this is DESIGN. William McDonough says that the need for regulation indicates a failure in design.

The design of the product goes 'way beyond just cosmetics. There is only so much you can do with an enclosure for a PC board, but there is LOTS you can do with the system as a whole. Case modding is just a place to start. Functional design improvements are being made in everything from the input devices ( http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1112012 ,00.asp http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/ ) to really innovative interfaces ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/).

The IDEO method cards are different from the "Creative Whack Pack" or "Thinkertoys" cards, in that they redefine the product design domain. The jobs of the future are going to be design jobs requiring both high creativity and high technical ability. If someone in India or China can do your job as well and cheaper than you, or if a computer can do your job better and faster, your job is obsolete.

The first person that Ive stumbled across addressing these problems and offering insight is Dan Pink

His current book 'A WHOLE NEW MIND' leads me to believe he he really understands the issues at hand here and (unlike most others) is willing to go out on a limb and offer what I think to be some pretty interesting solutions .

Here an excerpt that explains the basics of his idea.

The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers will now reap societys richest rewards and share its greatest joys.

The first person that Ive stumbled across addressing these problems and offering insight is Dan Pink

His current book 'A WHOLE NEW MIND' leads me to believe he he really understands the issues at hand here and (unlike most others) is willing to go out on a limb and offer what I think to be some pretty interesting solutions .

Here an excerpt that explains the basics of his idea.

The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers will now reap societys richest rewards and share its greatest joys.