A talk about motivation

Listen to the talk about motivation to practise and improve your listening skills.

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 …

Task 1

Exercise

Task 2

Exercise

Discussion

What motivates you in your job or studies?

Download

Worksheet81.46 KB

Try another listening

Language level

B2 Upper intermediate

Do you need to improve your English listening skills?

Join thousands of learners from around the world who are improving their English listening skills with our online courses.

Find out more

What motivate me in my studies is to know that if I keep working hard now, I'll be able to be where I want to be in the future, and even the things aren't easy now, in 10 years from now on, I'll look back and thank me for the hard work.

I am motivated during the studies when my teacher or parents point out my mistake. When I am encouraged by my parents, I become more ambitious to achieve the goal. My goal is to learn more and more through out my life because KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

Personally, I have observed experiences where salary increments and promotions contributed to the resignation of employees; they aren't necessarily motivators. More money is offered for getting the job done! The fact that task achievement but social life counts, most employers often take for granted small but precious valuable things like love, friendship, gratitude and respect. In the office these things seem less important and oftentimes use of obscene language becomes a habit. Acquiring respect doesn't come easily and falling a victim of verbal abuse is usually the end result. The assumption that materialistic incentives are effective motivators is totally wrong. Earning respect feels to be more of a valuable incentives for me than anything else. It's the thing that keeps me on my job.

I used to be a visual effect Artist. one particular shot has so much to do in it because of that some time It could even take months to complete the 2second shot. But I needed to motivate myself by self-talking like maybe you are not able to see the end result now but wait for the movie to release and watch your work in cinema. That feeling was always made motivated me to do what I was doing. But unfortunately not anymore I have quit my job now to move ahead in life.

I have never been interested or motivated by rewards or any kind of material incentives. Instead, I feel delighted when people give recognition for my work, admire and respect what I perform. Also, I strongly dislike rigid and strict rules, I feel more creative and with great positive energy when I'm given some freedom and flexibility.

Recognition and admiration are also its kinds of reward Asni. You're getting something out of what you're putting your energy in. I agree it's difficult to work in such conditions like strictness, people feel less creative in these kinds of circumstances.

Hello everyone, after listening to the audio and meditating on the concepts and studies that are exposed in them, I would like to make you participate in two ideas: In my personal experience at work, the spirit of improvement has motivated me more than the economic incentive. On a professional level, I have been responsible for technical teams where the economic incentive was the idea of some but not all, individual economic needs always have the last word. I have observed that when the group of workers forms a team with a clear and fixed idea, the proposed objectives are achieved, either to earn more money or to improve processes

At this moment in my life, money is very important to me so I would be a lot motivated if my boss put some economic incentives for achievement in my job, but I'm really motivated for independence knowing that I can support myself, take my own decisions. buy my own stuff and save money to reach what I want, without taking a fee from my parents and let them spend their money only on them.

I do not actually know how to answer this question because I am quite struggling on how to keep motivated in my current job. At first, I really enjoyed being a teacher. Seeing my students go out of the room with newly acquired knowledge on my subject really feels satisfying. But that is not my problem. It is actually the work environment and the toxic people around me in that workplace. This caused me to think about quitting and getting a new job or enrolling to grad school. However, I cannot quit as of the moment and get a new job because this pandemic makes it hard to find one. So I just keep on thinking that I am doing this for the kids and for my country. Sometimes, the money also keep me motivated because I get paid relatively higher than other public school teachers.