Ownership and Job Satisfaction

Dec 19, 2006

First, go read this post by Alexander Kjerulf at Chief Happiness Officer.

Okay, back? Good.

This point gets proven time and time again that the only way to get people motivated about work is to give them reasons to be intrinsically motivated about work. Alexander identifies four areas to get people motivated:

Out of all of those I’d venture to say, at for me personally, that control is the most important. Sometimes boring work has to be done, and sometimes it’s a small enough project that you’ll be working alone, and sometimes you just won’t get recognized for it. But if you can say, “That’s mine. I made that.” You’re probably going to be at least reasonably happy to some degree.

Once your control is taken away and you’re saddled with an overly detailed functional spec the fun dissipates quickly. For me there is no more sure-fire way to kill my motivation then to take all the creativity and out of project by telling me exactly how to do it.

So for all your bosses, managers, and employers out there: give your employees control. Let them be creative and take charge of proejcts. If you don’t trust them to do that, why did you hire them in the first place?