Keep your eye on the prize! Whether you’re striving to achieve a career ambition or personal goal, having the ability to stay focused and driven can be immensely challenging.
At the beginning of every new year, many choose to set resolutions for themselves, correcting or promoting a particular behavior, such as learning a new skill or cutting down on a craving. The initial sense of focus that we have on newly-established objectives can gradually start to dimish as time goes on.
Employee Productivity: A Case Of Diminishing Returns
Goal-directed behavior is vital to a productive workplace. Leaders need their team members to have the psychological stamina to accomplish long term goals in the workplace. With team members completing small tasks and activities on a day-to-day basis, it can be easy for them to lose sight of the bigger picture.
Employees love to feel like they are building towards something. The competition of small and seemingly meaningless day-to-day tasks can distract team members away from the bigger picture of their work and the longer-term objectives of the company.
Implementing a progress monitoring system into your team workflow can enable team members to quite literally never lose sight of the steps being made towards the long term objectives. Having the ability to visibly track the progress they are making on the goals can encourage goal-directed behavior through motivation.
It’s all about building momentum! The secret ingredient to a highly-productive workforce is to provide team members with a consistent source of motivation. This ensures that employees approach their work with a regenerating level of drive and focus as they strive towards achieving a long term goal.
Typically, leaders are able to instill a sense of enthusiasm in their team at the beginning of a new project. The initial momentum that this positive attitude brings to a project can start to wear off as the weeks roll on.
In many ways, productivity is an endurance test that challenges our capability to work towards an objective. The further down the line you are, the more tired and distracted you are likely to become. It’s a simple case of diminishing returns.
The Research Of MIT Professor Dan Ariely
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Dan Ariely recently conducted several studies to analyze and dig deeper into the psychology of workplace behavior. From productivity to collaboration, each of the studies explored a different facet of workplace culture. Today, we’re particularly interested in the Professor’s study on seeing the fruits of our labor (PDF) and its effect on workplace performance.
Ariely instructed two groups of student participants to build characters from Lego’s Bionicles series. The students were paid decreasing amounts of money for each subsequent Bionicle that they built. In the process of building these characters, Ariely treated the two groups slightly differently.
While Ariely stored one group’s creations under the construction table, to be disassembled and taken apart at the end of the experiment, the other group’s Bionicles were broken apart and disassembled by Ariely soon after the students had built them.
As a result, the first group, whose creations were stored, made 11 Bionicles, whilst the second group, whose creations were disassembled, only made seven before they quit. Even though the experiment may have appeared trivial to some of the participants, seeing the fruits of their labor clearly had an effect on their productivity.
With the findings of this experiment in mind, how can leaders present progress and achievement to team members for increased motivation and enhanced productivity?
Performance Tracking Tool on Chats
We have just the answer for you! Say “hello” to Karma Bot! This is our intuitive workplace tool that can bring recognition of achievement to the very core of your team’s operation, with seamless integration into Slack.
Karma Bot has been purposefully designed to promote a high-performance team culture across workplaces. It is our mission to make workforces more productive. We believe this can be achieved through the effective recognition and appreciation of every individual on a team.
Ready to start motivating the employees in your workplace to drive productivity? Add Karma Bot to Slack ot Microsoft Teams today.
Driving Workplace Performance With Positive Reinforcement