Motivating your Employees is Easy with Octalysis

How can your Company make your employees’ life truly meaningful. How can you get them to brag about your company outside of their work hours?

Wait just a minute, you don’t get it? You already make life great for them. They get a decent wage, pension plans, get days off, can collaborate on cool social platforms and your people get a lot of autonomy. Your company has nailed it. Right?

If this is how you’re thinking about workplace gamification and employee motivation design, you’re probably doing it wrong.

It is quite difficult to optimize employee motivation. (We’ve written about employee types over here–must read if you like astronomy). You know that you have to balance intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, while providing triggers for those motivators. A better manager will also account for the varying strengths in their team, and design for different player types. The work place design already incorporates recessive and dominant motivators personalized by the individual or employee.

But something is still missing. Your staff turnover is higher than you would like it to be. At work people are doing an okay job, but they are not LIVING the company. They are not embodying the spirit that you see it, the way you feel it.

Why is this happening?

Simple: you have not created an Epic work place yet where relevant Meaning is created. And if you do, people are not aware about it enough.

 

Making employees lives EPIC (through workplace gamification)

With more and more choice about where to work and what to work on, top employers must consider why a given employee would, given so many other great options, choose their company over a competitor’s.

The best answer will include but not be limited to making the employee feel like the work will add value to their lives.

  • Employees at SpaceX can easily say they are helping to build the first mission to Mars.
  • Employees of Habitat for Humanity are helping build sustainable housing for people in need.

Now tell me: how does your company energize people for their yearning to be part to something bigger than themselves?

 

Epic Meaning & Calling

At first glance, it seems a company needs a strong sense of what we refer to in the Octalysis Framework as Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling.

Epic Meaning and Calling is a White Hat Core Drive that sits on top of the Octalysis octagon. It is empowers us as we have an innate wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves. It addresses our need for purpose in life. Most importantly it is a long term motivator that can inspire people for decades, centuries even millennia (look at the enduring power of religion).

 

Your company’s purpose, often defined as your company’s mission, need not be as lofty as going to Mars or building homes for the needy the world over. But you probably need something.

So start thinking today about how you can create a meaningful company purpose. Is your enterprise liberalizing mobility for consumers (like Uber)? Is it giving meaning to people’s shopping choices? Are you serving humanity through recruitment?

Analyze what your company does. Frame it into something epic and, most importantly, communicate it and incorporate it in your work place design. Try it, it works!

A touch of creativity in workplace gamification

But, Epic Meaning & Calling isn’t enough. There are examples of employees getting burned out at companies like Space X despite Musk’s vision to go to Mars.

In the Octalysis Framework, the Core Drive which has the most enduring impact in any motivational system design is undoubtedly Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. This is the motivation you feel when you have autonomous choices and the freedom to “do it your way”.

When coupled with Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling and Core Drive 2: Accomplishment & Development, you have rounded out the White Hat portion of the Octalysis octagon.

Base your workplace and workflow design around these core drives and you will  create long-lasting, happy employees, who truthfully speak well of the company even when they aren’t at work.

Course correcting

Now is the time to make your meaningful choice for your company. Will you start the process of turning your workplace culture around, or will you let it continue to drag and eventually die of neglect?

Talk to us now. We can help you make that epic shift in the work place.

 

Joris@OctalysisGroup.com

Managing Director

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