Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

States and the UK have annual turnover rates that average about 35 percent, double the rate for other jobs. In some call centers the annual turnover rate exceeds 100 percent, meaning that, on average, none of the people working there today will be there a year from now.
Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer
Zappos.com
(now part of
Amazon.com
), thought there was abetter way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees. So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn’t for them and want to leave, he’ll pay them no hard feelings. Hsieh is hacking the Motivation 2.0 operating system like a brilliant and benevolent teenage computer whiz. He’s using an “if-then” reward not to motivate people to perform better, but to weed out those who aren’t fit fora Motivation style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique. Zappos doesn’t monitor its customer service employees call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well how they do it is up to them.
The results of this emphasis on autonomy over technique Turnover at Zappos is minimal. And although it’s still young, Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the United States—ahead of better-known names like Cadillac, BMW, and Apple and roughly equal to ritzy brands like Jaguar and the Ritz-Carlton.
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Not bad fora shoe company based in the Nevada desert.
What Zappos is doing is part of a small but growing move to restore some measure of individual freedom in jobs usually known for the lack of it. For instance, while many enterprises are offshoring work to low-cost providers overseas, some companies are reversing the trend by beginning what’s known as “homeshoring.” Instead of requiring customer service reps to report to a single large call center, they’re routing the calls to the employees homes. This cuts commuting time for staff, removes them from physical monitoring, and provides far greater autonomy over how they do their jobs.
The American airline JetBlue was one of the first to try this approach. From its launch in 2000, JetBlue has relied on telephone customer service employees who work at home. And from its launch, JetBlue has earned customer service rankings far ahead of its competitors. Productivity and job satisfaction are generally higher in homeshoring than in conventional arrangements—in part because employees are more comfortable and less monitored at home. But it’s also because this autonomy-centered approach draws from a deeper pool of talent. Many homeshore employees are parents,
students, retirees, and people with disabilities—those who want to work, but need to do it their own way. According to one report, between 70 and percent of home-based customer service agents have college degrees—double the percentage among people working in traditional call centers.
Ventures like Alpine Access, PHH Arval, and LiveOps, which run customer service departments fora range of companies, report that after adopting this method, their recruiting costs fall to almost zero. Prospective employees come to them. And now these home-based customer service reps are working fora number of US. companies—including Flowers, J. Crew, Office Depot, even the Internal Revenue Service—handling customer inquiries the way they choose.
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As in any effective Motivation 3.0 workplace, it’s their call.
Team
Whatever your place in the birth order, consider what it’s like to be the third child in a family. You don’t get a say in choosing the people around you.
They’re there when you arrive. Worse, one or two of them might not be so glad to see you. And getting rid of even just one of them is usually impossible.
“Autonomy over what we do is most important. The biggest difference between working for other studios and running my own has been the fact that I can
choose what job we take on and what product, service, or institution we promote. This I find the single most important question When I’m close to the content,
research becomes easy, meetings become interesting (people who produce interesting products or services are mostly interesting themselves, and I don’t
have to be involved in false advertising.”

STEFAN SAGMEISTER
Designer
Taking anew job and holding most jobs are similar. Enterprising souls might be able to scratch out some autonomy over task, time, and technique—
but autonomy over team is a taller order. That’s one reason people are drawn to entrepreneurship—the chance to build a team of their own. But even in more traditional settings, although far from typical yet, a few organizations are discovering the virtues of offering people some amount of freedom over those with whom they work.
For example, at the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, the people who are nominally in charge of each department don’t do the hiring. That task falls to a department’s employees. After a job candidate has worked a thirty-day trial period on a team, the prospective teammates vote on whether to hire that person full-time. At W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 inaction, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.
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The ability to put together a pickup basketball team of company talent is another attraction of 20 percent time. These initiatives usually slice across the organization chart, connecting people who share an interest, if not a department. As Google engineer Bharat Mediratta told The New York Times, If your percent idea is anew product, it’s usually pretty easy to just find a few like-minded people and start coding away And when pushing fora more systemic change in the organization, Mediratta says autonomy over team is even more important. Those efforts require what he calls a “grouplet”—a small, self-organized team that has almost no budget and even less authority, but that tries to change something within the company. For instance,
Mediratta formed a testing grouplet to encourage engineers throughout the company to implement a more efficient way to test computer code. This informal band of coders, a team built autonomously without direction from the top, slowly turned the organization on its axis.”
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Still, the desire for autonomy can often collide with other obligations. One surprise as Atlassian ran the numbers on its task autonomy experiment was that most employees came insubstantially under the 20 percent figure. The main reason They didn’t want to letdown their current teammates by abandoning ongoing projects.
Although autonomy over team is the least developed of the four Ts, the ever-escalating power of social networks and the rise of mobile apps now make this brand of autonomy easier to achieve—and in ways that reach beyond a single organization. The open-source projects I mentioned in Chapter, in which ad hoc teams self-assemble to build anew browser or create better server software, area potent example. And once again, the science affirms the value of something traditional businesses have been slow to embrace. Ample research has shown that people working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams.
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Likewise, studies by Deci and others have shown that people high in intrinsic motivation are better coworkers.
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And that makes the possibilities on this front enormous. If you want to work with more Type Is, the best strategy is to become one yourself. Autonomy, it turns out, can be contagious.

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