building a-purposeful-company-kapta-ebook

70% of working

Americans

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with their jobs,

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co-workers.

Building a Purposeful CompanyMotivating human behavior in the workplace today based on a rewards-based system not

only trumps growth, but it stifles innovation and is no longer a productive way to inspire

human potential. Enticing employees with compensation packages to further corporate

interests does not translate into maximized performance or long-term satisfaction for em-

ployees. The carrot and the stick approach to getting employees to work longer, harder

hours is both outdated and unexamined. It seems however that even the best companies

are still using these tired and outdated tactics to keep their employees temporarily happy.

But there is a chronic dissatisfaction in the workplace. Gallup’s 2013 State of the American

Workplace study found that as many as 70% of working Americans were unfulfilled with

their jobs, 18% to such an extent that they are actively undermining their co-workers. The

short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes that once worked in the age

of the Industrial Revolution do not translate to the Information Age.

Intrinsic motivation is the new stimulus employees are using to navigate their careers in

the workplace today. Deep satisfaction and genuine happiness comes from the ability to

direct their own lives, to learn and create new things and to do better by themselves and

their world.

The economy is now an ecosystem of mass information moving in di!erent directions at

warp speed and employee solipsism needs to be redirected to achieve greater unity so

that corporate purpose can be achieved. Employers need to reexamine WHY not WHAT

they are doing to reengage employees so that motivation and genuine interest in the

workplace can be redefined.

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As our society

has grown in

complexity, we as

a species have

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our organizing

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our operating

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EvolutionThe human species has an innate biological drive to survive. It stems not from our external

environment but from the biology of our very brains. The evolution from primate brain to

human brain has evolved over time into a rational, feeling and thinking brain. The limbic

system is where our basic instinct for belonging exists and where our emotions and feel-

ings originate. As we have developed and matured as a species in the workplace, it was

typically common to reward or punish employees for their behavior, specifically in the

last century, when our brains were less developed and more logical in nature. Pavlovian

theory has been used indirectly in the workplace for some time now. It is the concept that

people respond to conditioned reflexes based on external rewards, and it was an original

and innovative concept in the 1900’s but it no longer holds true today.

Manipulating employees with money, rewards and paid time o!, typically done so out of

fear to realize results, does not inspire or motivate them, it leaves them unsatisfied and

disgruntled. Humans are more than the sum of their biological urges and have an inherent

tendency to seek out new experiences and challenging problems in order to grow, learn

and become better people.

As our society has grown in complexity, we as a species have evolved and our organizing

system (including our brains) and our operating drive has shifted. The growth of industry

spawned the Industrial Revolution and Pavlovian theory was grounded in this Age and

motivated on the principles that improved performance increases productivity with the

correct externalized reward system. Our basic instincts for motivation and reward still hold

true today, but the meaning behind it has shifted. We still seek reward and avoid punish-

ment but we need to know WHY we are doing it.




Our intrinsic

motivation is to

participate (sense

of belonging), to

give (contribute

to something

larger than self)

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challenging

problems at the

workplace, with

our without pay.


The information age we live in today has spawned a digital industry that has created a

knowledge-based society that connects people into an intelligent, self-organizing system.

The information industry allows individuals to explore their personalized needs through

this medium and because we all inherently operate on this platform and the Internet itself

is inherently self-organizing, employees today need autonomy to achieve and sustain

satisfaction in the workplace. We are operating now from both the limbic system and the

neocortex region of the brain, which is both rational and feeling.

Our intrinsic motivation is to participate (sense of belonging), to give (contribute to some-

thing larger than self) and to solve challenging problems at the workplace, with our with-

out pay. The overriding message is that these new motivations are intrinsic and need au-

tonomy to survive. Employers need to begin to shift their mindsets and strategy to comply

with the intrinsic desires and aspirations of their employees if they wish to realize results

at the workplace and see long-term growth and profitability.




Even if the group

with extrinsic

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their goals,

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their lives. The

attainment of

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can actually

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GoalsA group of scholars from Harvard Business School, Northwestern University, University of

Arizona, and the University of Pennsylvania questioned the value behind goal creation.

Because people thrive o! creative problem solving at work, goals seem to be a good ac-

cessory to challenging situations. They discovered however that goal setting should be

highly selective. Goals can narrow focus and ultimately self-goals are healthy but goals

imposed by others are not. When an employee creates a personal goal, they are devoted

to attaining their own self mastery, but when goals are imposed on them for sales targets

for instance, it narrows their focus and can in the long run produce unethical behavior be-

cause people end up looking for short cuts to finish the task or complete the goal.

Edward Deci, Richard Ryan and Christopher Niemiec questioned a group of graduates

from the University of Rochester about their life goals and planned on following up with

them early on in their career to see if their goals had changed in anyway. Some of the

students had “extrinsic motivations,” to become wealthy and famous for instance. Others

had “intrinsic motivations,” to help support the lives of others, to learn and to grow. After

the follow up study, Deci and Ryan found that the people with intrinsic aspirations felt more

satisfaction and subjective well being with their lives, which had lower levels of anxiety

and depression than the students with extrinsic aspirations. Even if the group with extrinsic

goals realized their goals, they still were unsatisfied in their lives. The attainment of goals

(in this instance) has no impact on well being and can actually contribute to ill being. They

found that when people do get what they want, it’s not always what they need. What they

discovered is that people need support in creating the right kinds of goals. Companies

and employers must understand this and help their employees better understand the

WHY behind their goals.





The consequences of understanding the WHY could rejuvenate our businesses and re-

make our world if done in the right way. Here are some suggestions for creating impactful,

autonomous goals in the workplace.

Set smaller and larger goals so that when it comes time for evaluation, tasks have

inevitably been accomplished.

Create a purpose. Then create goals that support the purpose. Make sure employ-

ees understand how every aspect of their work relates to the larger purpose.

Let employees create their own goals.

Encourage peer-to-peer rewards for goal setting and team building. Kim Horn and

Associates, a civil engineering firm in North Carolina created a unique system that

encourages company morale. Without asking permission, anyone in the company

can award a $50 bonus to any of their colleagues. It’s in real time and it doesn’t

come from management. Because the reward is from a co-worker, there is more

meaning and less hierarchy involved. This can be woven into group goal setting to

encourage goals to be realized as play, not work.

Writer Sylvia Hewitt has found in her research that the generation of the Boomers and the

Millennials are redefining what success is today and how goals translate into success. Both

generations are willing to receive a remixed set of rewards in exchange for more altruistic

outcomes. Neither generation rates money as the most important form of compensation.

Great teams and the ability to give back to society through work were found to be more

important than compensation. These generations are the new “purpose maximizers” and

they represent the dominant pool of employees in the workplace today.





AutonomyCharlottesville based CEO Je! Gunther launched an experiment in autonomy at Meddius,

one of the software companies he runs. He turned the company into a ROWE, a results-

only-work-environment. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources

executives, came up with the concept of ROWE. In a ROWE environment, people do not

have schedules, they do not have to show up or leave work at any given time, and they

only have to be held accountable for the work to get done. Management they determined

is not about micromanaging people at the o"ce, it’s about creating conditions for people

to do their best work. Gunther found that after a few weeks into his ROWE experiment,

productivity rose and stress declined. He sees his employees as partners, not resources.

The experiment was so successful; he turned it into a full-time, operational component of

his business.

Deci and Ryan concluded that “self-determination” theory is the autonomous quality of

human nature. They found that autonomous motivation involves behaving with a sense of

volition and choice. Controlled motivation, or being managed, involves pressure and a de-

mand towards a specific outcome. This is not the go-it-alone individualism one may think

of when working alone, it means acting on purpose and with choice. According to behav-

ioral science studies, autonomy promotes better grades, greater persistence at school,

higher productivity, less burnout and greater levels of psychological well being. The Age

of Information calls for a renaissance of self-direction so that employees can reorganize

into a purposeful and autonomous group, working in tandem with each other and alone.

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greater levels of

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Another aspect of autonomy comes with full ownership over projects at the workplace.

Allowing employees to dictate their own projects at work as though they were their own

start-up companies is a new approach to autonomy.

Giving full authority to teams to create what they need to, as long as it aligns with an over-

riding company purpose, is important for intrinsic motivation and autonomy at the work-

place.

Another facet to autonomy is sovereignty over time. Being on the clock diminishes the

motivation to be in the flow. In an experiment with Best Buy and the ROWE formula, they

changed the hourly employees into a more flexible program that resembled salaried em-

ployees. They found that these employees reported better relationships with family and

friends, more company loyalty, and more focus and energy. Productivity increased by

35%, and voluntary turnover was 320 basis points lower than in teams that did not make

the change.

Social networks and mobile applications make it easier for people to connect and be part

of a larger community without relinquishing autonomy. Open source projects, like building

the Firefox open-source project, in which self-organizing teams self-assemble to get work

done without pay is an example of autonomous teams that work in tandem with social

networks and community to produce quality work.

In Delivering Happiness, Zappos found that giving call center employees greater free-

dom over how they handled customers, without using a mandatory call script, gave them

more autonomy over their position and created greater satisfaction at the workplace.

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Encouraging autonomy at the workplace doesn’t discourage accountability. There is an

inherent assumption that people want to be accountable for their work and if given the

necessary freedom to do so, will help them create a pathway to realize their destiny at the

workplace.

A recent Gallup study found that almost 50% of people were not engaged at work, 20%

were disengaged and the costs of this disengagement was $300 billion /year in lost pro-

ductivity, a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal.

The costs of control, general distrust and lack of flexibility in the workplace is proving to be

costly, unproductive and unsatisfying.

The best predictor of productivity at the workplace is a desire for intellectual challenge.

Scientists motivated by this desire filed more patents than those whose motivation was

money. Challenge can mean di!erent things to di!erent people.

To increase the flow of cleaning sta! at hospitals, a hospital examined how they could

better engage their employees. They decided to increase the minimum amount of work

available to them and suggested that they take on new tasks like talking to patients and

helping nurses. The cleaning sta! that chose to engage in more tasks reported greater

satisfaction at the workplace and boosted their own view of their skill sets.

Employers need to start asking di!erent questions and reframe the way they manage

their employees. Instead of asking the question of how to get people motivated, they

need to start asking why they want to motivate their employees and why their employees

are intrinsically motivated.

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Profit may be the catalyst for most companies today but it should not be the objective and

the purpose should be the end goal. The correlation between money and happiness has

proven to be a weak indicator at the workplace but spending money for other people or

on a cause increases our subjective well being.

Attainment of a set of goals has no correlation to happiness, or the impact on well being.

Success depends on having goals, but specifically on having the right goals. Employers

need to get clear about purpose and what they want to achieve from the goals that they

should allow their employees to set and maintain.

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on having goals,

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having the right

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want to achieve

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EngagementFirefox is a free open sourced web based browser that was built by volunteers with no pay

and now has over 150 million users. Open source development depends on intrinsic mo-

tivation. MIT management professor Karim Lakhani and Boston Consulting Group consul-

tant Bob Wolf surveyed 684 open-source developers in North America and Europe about

why they participated in open-source projects. The strongest motive they found was “that

enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working

on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.” There was also a “desire to give

a gift to the programming community.” Open source is one way people are restructuring

what they do along new organizational lines with di!erent motivating frameworks.

Control breeds compliance and autonomy gives birth to engagement. When employees

are truly engaged, they are in a rhythm that self-directs them to a higher purpose. They

perform better and collaborate with others more fluidly.

Engagement also comes from a need to belong. The need to belong is also derived from

the limbic system of our brains. The need to belong is a constant that exists across all

people in all cultures. When we feel like we belong we feel connected and we feel safe.

When a company can articulate why they do the things that they do, there is an inherent

belief system attached to the meaning behind their motivations. The products or services

that they produce is a larger landscape for their belief system as a company and when we

value those beliefs, we feel connected to the company and engage more actively with the

products that they produce.

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compliance

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gives birth to

engagement





This holds true as a consumer and as an employee of a company. When companies and

leaders can articulate what they believe, it gives us a greater sense that we belong with

them. Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that a company can o!er something

larger than their own self-gain to drive the organization. Value by definition is the transfer-

ence of trust. Companies need to talk about the WHY and prove it with the WHAT. Em-

ployees want to be on board with employers that they can trust and engage with. They

need to align with their belief systems, trust that their WHY is purpose driven and feel a

sense of belonging so that they can truly engage their time, energy and work towards a

greater purpose for themselves and for the company.

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we have a sense

that a company

can offer

something larger

than their own

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the organization.





Legacy, Mastery, and FreedomHumans by their very nature seek purpose. Companies have long considered purpose

only an accessory to ‘real’ work. But things are changing, and our ecosystems in which we

operate have changed and thus so have our brains and the way they assimilate informa-

tion. Today, in the Age of Information, purpose maximizers are taking a stand against profit

maximizers as a guiding principle that things in the workplace must change if employees

are to o!er their loyalty, engagement and expertise. A higher purpose must be instilled in

the workplace and that starts with asking the question WHY.

Asking WHY will help to create a new legacy for companies and the way they run their

businesses. It will stem from an intrinsic motivation as opposed to focusing on extrinsic

motivators. When autonomy is granted at the workplace, it gives employees the freedom

to master their work and to take pride in all that they produce. Flexibility and freedom

comes with the ability to choose who you work with, what projects you work on, where

and when you work each day, and getting paid enough to support the lifestyle you want

to live.

A cultural renaissance is happening in the workplace today that is an internal shift in the

way companies run their organizations and treat their employees. Building companies

with purpose will pave the way for how companies will truly succeed and profit in the

coming years.

A cultural

renaissance is

happening in the

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that is an internal

shift in the way

companies

run their

organizations

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employees.





BibliographySimon Sinek. Start with Why. Penguin Group, 2009.

Daniel H. Pink. Drive. Penguin Group, 2009.

Tony Hsieh. Delivering Happiness




About Kapta Kapta provides executives with a cloud-based sys-

tem to clearly communicate company goals, track every employee’s expected

contribution and review overall status through a real-time dashboard. Headquartered

in Boulder, Colorado, and founded in 2011, Kapta gives executives a clear line of sight

into each team member’s performance and the system’s easy-to-use alignment tools keep

employees on track in less than five minutes each week. Kapta’s intuitive input process

virtually eliminates “work about work” and instead provides employee alignment

and executive feedback to successfully scale your business.

For more information, please visit

kaptasystems.com

building a-purposeful-company-kapta-ebook

Technology

challenging

goal setting

higher purpose

limbic system

cleaning staff

industrial

social networks

pavlovian