Introduction
Gone are the days when you could simply show up at work and do what your boss asked of you. With that in mind, how do you help your remote teams find the motivation for work? Here are some tips to get started:
Understand Your Intrinsic Motivation
The key to understanding intrinsic motivation is to realize that it has nothing to do with rewards or punishments. Instead, it’s the desire to do something because it is interesting, enjoyable, or satisfying.
Intrinsic motivation is more sustainable than extrinsic motivation and is more likely to lead to long-term behavior change. One study found that while both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards motivated people in the short term (a few days), after several months, only those who were intrinsically motivated continued their healthy habits.
Develop a Positive Mindset
- A positive mindset is a key to success. It’s important to stay positive because having a negative attitude can be toxic and bring down everyone around you.
- The best way to develop a positive mindset is by training yourself to think positively on a regular basis. To do this, make sure that you set aside sometime each day where you focus on thinking about the good things in life rather than the bad ones. You could even try keeping track of all of the positives in your life for one week and then see how many there actually are!
Clarify Your Aspirations
Defining your aspirations is an important part of setting goals, and this can be a challenge for remote teams. As an entrepreneur, you need to be able to articulate what you want in order to achieve it. Whether you’re working with others or on your own, it’s essential that you know exactly what motivates and inspires you. This will help fuel your passion for achieving success in all areas of life—and motivate others around you as well!
The hardest part about clarifying aspirations is making sure they’re realistic (for example, don’t expect anyone else’s dreams but yours). So take some time thinking about where exactly do want to go from here. Do we want more clients? More revenue? Better communication? Learning how each member approaches their job responsibilities will help guide everyone towards common goals; however, if there aren’t any initial ground rules set up beforehand then conflicts may arise later down the road when someone gets upset because another employee wasn’t doing enough work compared against what was expected out of them so either way, before starting anything else out right away have each person contribute ideas first so everyone feels comfortable working together on one project rather than having separate ones which could cause tension between coworkers later on down the line when expectations aren’t being met regularly enough resulting into frustration among workers who might feel like ‘wasting’ their time after putting effort into something only for nothing at all coming outta nowhere thus creating stress levels within everyone involved including yourself which defeats
Set Smaller Goals
In life and in business, it’s what you do with your time that matters. The same is true for remote teams; a lack of motivation is often due to a lack of focus and direction. If you want your team to be productive and motivated, consider setting smaller goals instead of one large goal.
This reduces the chance that any single member will feel overwhelmed by the workload or pressure from management (or self-imposed). Instead, divide up large tasks into smaller ones and give each person their own mini-project list—this way they can stay focused on getting things done without getting stressed out about how long it’ll take or how much work they have left ahead of them.
Embrace Creativity and Imagination in Your Work
Creativity and imagination can help you get motivated to work. Being creative is an important part of problem-solving, innovation, and learning. Imagination helps you think outside the box and solve problems.
In addition, creativity and imagination are not only useful in your job but also necessary for your own motivation at work. You need to be creative if you want to be motivated!
Incorporate Passion into Your Work
Passion is a great motivator. In fact, passion can be a motivator for both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which means it can help you achieve your goals on many levels!
If you’re passionate about something—be it helping people or developing new skills—you’ll be more motivated to work hard and succeed in the long term. When your passion aligns with your job role, this can lead to higher performance levels and better results than if you were doing something just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
In addition to being personally fulfilling, having a passion for what you do allows you to help others who may not share those same interests. By carrying out tasks with gusto and giving them your best effort every step of the way (no matter how menial or difficult), people around will take notice of how much time and energy went into making their lives easier/better/more interesting because of what they did together over time
Move Beyond Rewards and Punishments in the Workplace
A common management practice is to reward or punish employees for their work. However, rewards and punishments often carry negative connotations that can lead to unintended consequences. For example, if you offer someone a bonus for a job well done, they may feel you are bribing them (which may reduce intrinsic motivation). If you take away a perk like free lunches because someone didn’t meet their goals, they may feel as though they’re being unfairly singled out (which will also reduce intrinsic motivation). In order to minimize the impact of rewards and punishments on employee motivation levels overall, try replacing them with more positive feedback and encouragement over time.
When you better understand the motivators that drive your work, you can help your team do the same.
- Intrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation is the desire to do something for its own sake, and it’s a powerful driver of human behavior. But what does this mean? How can we use intrinsic motivation to motivate our remote teams?
Intrinsic motivators are internal rewards that come from within an individual; they’re not influenced by external factors such as money or prizes. They’re related to the activity itself and serve as its main source of gratification and reward—things like accomplishment, mastery, growth, purposefulness, and autonomy (to name a few). When you’re intrinsically motivated by something in your work life, it means that you’re driven by a passion for the task itself—you enjoy doing it because of who you are and what interests you about it.
It’s important to note that intrinsic motivations aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive from extrinsic ones: being intrinsically motivated does not preclude having an interest in getting promoted or earning more money; however, these things will take on less significance for someone who has already found their calling in their job (if this doesn’t sound like much fun at all!). In fact, digital nomadism might be one way people find themselves pursuing their true passions without worrying too much about financial pressures (or other pressures).
Conclusion
We’ve covered a lot of ground here, from the basics of motivation to some more advanced strategies for increasing your intrinsic motivation. If you take away just one thing from this blog post, let it be this: it’s important to understand what drives you and why you do what you do at work. Once you know that, there are many ways to infuse those same motivations into your team members—and ultimately, lead them to success.