Why Motiro?

Inspired people in motivated teams are key to extraordinary success. In today’s knowledge economy, you get nowhere without fully engaged teams of energetic and motivated human beings.

Fortunately, thirty years of research and hundreds of business case studies have demonstrated that simple tools based on Self Determination Theory can be used to spark transformative discussions in your teams that bolster motivation and keep people united. Motiro is a tool that leverages this research to analyze your team's motivation levels and ignite such constructive discussions around it.

How does Motiro work?

Motiro automatically sends a survey to each person inside your teams and processes the answers, allowing you to:

• Understand the motivation profile of your teams,
• Benchmark your teams against others around the world,
• Identify teams that require immediate leadership attention,
• Identify high performing teams that others can emulate,
• Build awareness and personal responsibility among team members,
• Track progress over time of your teams,
• Avoid bugging teams with expensive, lengthy, generic and useless staff surveys.

What is a Team?

A team is a group of people working together. It can be a department, a subsidiary. A team can be the employees of a small company or the athletes of a sports club. It can also be a group of people volunteering for a cause. An organization can have many teams, one for each of its departments or headquarters. Each team has one or more managers who occupy a supervisory position. Managers add members to the team and invite them to answer the survey.

How does Motiro survey teams?

When you create an account with Motiro, you tell us the name of your team. For example, if you work at “Palm Beach Smoothies” and you're creating a team for its software developers, you could call your team "Coconut Coders".

After your team is created on Motiro, you can populate it by adding the email addresses of its members. Then, you click a button to start surveying. Each team member will receive an email invitation to Motiro's survey. This survey has 24 multiple-choice questions and takes five minutes to complete. As survey results come in, Motiro dynamically creates and updates a report that describes the motivational state of your team. All team members have access to this report.

What is presented in the Motiro report?

Some of what motivates us to act comes from our satisfactions that are inherent to the action itself–from our joy of doing it. These are called intrinsic motivators. Within an organization, intrinsic motivators are only strong when three basic human needs are met:

1. Autonomy: when people are responsible of taking decisions about the way they perform their activities.
2. Belongingness: when people feel they're part of a cohesive group, where activities are conducted through meaningful, warm and strong human relationships.
3. Competence: when people feel they're capable of performing their activities with proficiency.

When these three basic needs are met, intrinsic motivation flourishes. Motiro quantifies and measures to which extent each of these needs are being met in your team.

When these basic needs are not met, it often signals that certain qualities in leadership and governance could be improved. With capable leaders, teams naturally find ways to meet these basic needs over time. Motiro identifies and scores three characteristics that are paramount to good leadership:

1. Understanding: leaders must be empathetic, and be sensitive to the personal realities and circumstances of each team member.
2. Encouragement: leaders must make team members comfortable and eager to share their opinions and ideas about the team, showing respect and appreciation for it.
3. Listening: leaders must be able to learn and act based on the feedback they receive from team members, so that team people feel their opinions are pondered and acted upon.

With all these aspects quantified in a neat dashboard, Motiro provides a starting point for constructive dialog on how leadership can be developed.

Rewarding and recognizing good work

Intrinsic motivators aren't solely responsible for making people happy in their teams. There are aspects which are external to the activities of the team that play a role in motivation. A good salary or social recognition of noble volunteer work are some examples. We call these factors extrinsic motivators.

Extrinsic motivators come from the support network and the sense of personal recognition the team is able to provide to its members. This comes in three forms:

1. Returns: advantages one obtains indirectly from being in the team, including access to a professional social network and the development of interesting professional skills.
2. Rewards: receiving personal recognition and acknowledgment for performing good work–including salary and bonuses.
3. Status: being recognized by friends, family and the community at large as someone who performs an honorable job.

In order to achieve high levels of motivation and engagement, both types of motivation drivers must be tapped. Motiro measures the impact of these three extrinsic motivators in your team, leading to interesting discussions that can help you discover ways to better motivate your teams extrinsically.

How is Motiro helping my team?

Once the team has strong intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, people start to feel good about being a part of the team in different ways, which reflect how motivated the team is. When a Motiro survey is conducted, Motiro builds a motivation profile to thoroughly assess the impact of leadership and team culture on its members. The following factors are considered in our motivation profile:

• Fulfillment: how much people in the team are satisfied with what they are currently doing.
• Meaning: how much do people find purpose and meaning in their work.
• Values: how much do people feel they share the same values with the rest of the team.
• Well-being: how much people feel their work contributes to their emotional well-being.
• Perseverance: how much do people want to continue working in the team.
• Engagement: how much people actively seek to improve their work practices.

After conducting a Motiro survey, the team has a chance to discuss its motivation profile and discover ways to develop its leadership, and its intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. After 3 months, a new Motiro survey can be conducted to measure the progress the team has made towards being more motivated, and to discuss further opportunities for improvement.