“Real Work Happens Outside the Office”: 5 TED Talks for Managers

Daniel Pink: The Mystery of Motivation

The experiment went like this: the subjects entered a room with one wall made of cork and a table next to it. On the table were a candle changsha mobile phone numbers database a box of pins, and matches. The task was as follows: “Attach the burning candle to the wall so that the wax does not drip onto the table.” The task can be solved by approaching it creatively. The key to the puzzle is the box with the pins in it.

Later, the same experiment – ​​but with one difference – was conducted by scientist Sam Glucksberg. He divided the subjects into two groups and offered one of them a reward if they solved the problem faster than the other. The result was surprising: the group that did not expect any reward for completing the task completed it faster than the group motivated by the reward . The experiment has been conducted in this form in many countries, cultures and age groups – always with the same result.

Daniel Pink explains what this means for businesses and organizations, and why carrot-and-stick motivation is not effective when looking for non-standard solutions. A motivation system that should support creativity should be based on three main principles: autonomy, mastery, and a higher purpose. How such a system works and why it is more effective than traditional motivation systems, you will learn in Daniel Pink’s lecture.

Jason Fried: “Real Work Happens Outside the Office”

Basecamp cofounder Jason Fried has an unconventional theory: He believes that the office is one of the worst places to work. For more than a decade, Fried has asked his friends and colleagues: Where do they go to get work done? Most people have mentioned coffee shops, libraries, private rooms at home, airplanes, trains, basements. Some have admitted that it doesn’t matter where they work—as long as they can do it early in the morning, late at night, or on weekends. Why is it that almost no one works well in an office?

Fried boils it down to the problem of office distractions: someone drops in to ask you something, you have 20 minutes to focus on the task, the courier calls, then a colleague from another department comes to talk about a new idea, another 15 minutes, then lunch – and so on and so forth. Some managers believe that there are many more such distractions at home: the television, the fridge, a walk outside. Fried, however, points out one key difference: home distractions are under your control – you can turn the radio on or off, but you have no influence at all over what is happening around you in the office.

The next two sources of disruption are managers and meetings, and especially managers who organize meetings. Many companies mistakenly believe that one hour-long meeting with 10 people is just one hour. This is misleading because when each employee spends an hour in a meeting, it means that one such meeting costs the company 10 hours of work.

Here are Fried’s tips for companies that want to help their employees be more effective:

1. Replace “Friday without a tie” with “quiet Thursday”: once or twice a month introduce a ban on talking loudly for at least half a day. You will see google partner premier the work efficiency of specialists during this time will be much higher.
2. Shift from active to passive communication: replace “five-minute” meetings and desk chats with emails and instant messaging (e.g. Slack). Yes, they can also distract people from work, but only when they decide to do so. Work, like sleep, has its phases. When an employee finishes a task, they will have time to calmly go through notifications and emails.
3. If you have a meeting you can cancel, do it. Don’t move it, just delete it, as if it had never been on your calendar. You’ll have the opportunity to think about how you could solve the problem differently, with respect for your time and the time of all your coworkers.

Chieh Huang: Confessions of a Calmed Micromanager

According to a study by Robert Half phone database more than 59% of people have experienced micromanagement at work at least once. 68% of them felt a decrease in enthusiasm as a result of this management style, and 55% felt a decrease in productivity.

One of the most famous micromanagers in modern business history was Steve Jobs. His increased need for control over employees led to the downfall of NeXT. It was only thanks to his colleagues, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter from Pixar, who focused on self-organization, that Steve Jobs changed his management style. He later said:

“It makes no sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Chieh Huang was that kind of manager at his own company until employee dissatisfaction came full circle and came back through HR reports. That’s when he decided to let go. Employees still made mistakes on smaller tasks, but they achieved big successes on projects that required creativity and out-of-the-box solutions. Hear more about what Huang accomplished after abandoning micromanagement in his talk.