Do the preparation task first. Then listen to the audio and do the exercises.
Preparation
Transcript
So, we think we know how to motivate people, right? Offer them a reward. Do this and you'll get this. Do this faster, earn more money. Do this better than everyone else, here's a promotion. We offer incentives when we want people to do things. We do it at work, at school, even at home with our kids. Tidy your room and you can watch TV.
But when social psychologists test whether incentives work, they get surprising results. Sam Glucksberg, from Princeton University, America, set people a problem to solve and told them he was going to time them to see how long they took. Then he put them in two groups. He offered one group a reward for finishing fast. Five dollars for anyone finishing in the top 25 per cent and 20 dollars for the person who finished the fastest of all. To the other group he offered no incentive, but he told them he was going to use their times to calculate an average time.
The first group, the ones with the reward, solved the problem faster, you'd think, right? Well, no, they actually took three and a half minutes longer than the group who just thought they were being timed. Incentive didn't work. In fact, it made them slower. This experiment has been repeated, with the same results, many times. But in business we still offer bonuses, promotions and rewards to staff.
That's fine if we want them to do something simple, like chop wood. We'll pay you more if you chop the wood faster. An incentive works then. But if we want someone to do something complex, something creative, something where they have to think, rewards don't work. They might even have the opposite result, and make people perform worse. Another study, by Dan Ariely, showed that the bigger the reward, the worse the subjects performed on a complex task. The reward made them focus so hard on the result that they couldn't think creatively any more.
And this all matters because more and more simple jobs will become automated. We'll be left with creative, problem-solving jobs that computers will never do. And we need to find a way to motivate people to do those jobs when we've proved the traditional incentives don't work.
So what does work? Giving your workers freedom; freedom to work on the things they want to work on, freedom to choose when, where and how they work. Want to work from home three days a week, get up late and work into the night instead? Fine. Just do the job well. And evidence shows people who choose the way they work get results. Companies that give employees time during the week to work on things that interest them and are not part of their regular job achieve amazing things. Some of the big tech companies are good examples of this, with ping-pong tables and areas to relax in …
I used this lesson in a class with a student and here is what he said:
"I believe the challanges are the most important thing to motivate me in my job".
I used this lesson in a class with a student and here is what she said:
"To me the motivation in the job is when I have freedom to create. I believe that a person needs to feel confident to share their ideas without being afraid of judgment".
sometimes when i do not have motivation i just start with it and after that i get motivation but when im tired i never have motvation! thank you for your .
I feel motivated when I have to do something new or work on something
that I'm interested in. It challenges my life. I will try to do my best to complete all of my goals.
I have a lot of motivations to learn English. I am teaching english for the children, I will make some trip abroad, ... So I try to do my best to learn english to achive the higher level.
I am really motivated when I do something that I am interested on, when I work on my passions and interests.
I really love when I can choose what to do and how to do it. Another thing that motivates me is the newness, when I have to do or to learn something new that I am interested on. I noticed that my motivation decreases when I force myself to do something that I don't really want to do. Moreover, my motivation decreases when I don't have time for any other passion. When my work or my study takes all my time I feel really sad and meaningless because I like to invest my time in many passions, not only in one thing.
Well, although I do some simple tasks at my job and I get some reward to do make them I prefer the kind of tasks that challenge my knowledge and make me research and find or develop a solution not so easy to achieve because it's an incentive itself the act of need to do something that I never did before. So despite it's important to get money in return to make something I prefer not to do simple tasks that could be done by a machine or be automated.
Related to my studies I prefer to study things that solve problems for the real life that would help people to make their life more simple and easy, so they would be able to focus their energy in solve more complex problems.
Thanks for the lesson.
Great site!
As a student I personally get motivated to learn english only,because I know it will be useful , however, when it comes to school it's the complete opposite. Since public schools in my country are not known for having a good level, when I enter the classroom my partners don't pay attention to the teacher, they start throwing things around and can become very noisy.
Not only that,but since teachers demand higher salaries they can be on strike for several days. Nevertheless, I started self-studying things, at least in my home I can concentrate beeter than in my classroom where no one is even a tiny bit interested in learning.
I have felt up and down in every obstacles that I encounter. However, my family motivates me to move on and gives me strength to persevere in life. As the saying goes, "try and try until you succeed."
In my job, I am motivated by recognition. I try to work well and seriously every day. I get difficult tasks to challenge myself and try to finish in time. I want to prove that I am going to do well at what I am doing.