Building a-purposeful-company-kapta-ebook

70% of working
Americans
with their jobs,
18% to such
an extent that
they are actively
co-workers.
Building a Purposeful Company
Motivating human behavior in the workplace today based on a rewards-based system not
only trumps growth, but it stifles innovation and is no longer a productive way to inspire
human potential. Enticing employees with compensation packages to further corporate
interests does not translate into maximized performance or long-term satisfaction for em-
ployees. The carrot and the stick approach to getting employees to work longer, harder
hours is both outdated and unexamined. It seems however that even the best companies
are still using these tired and outdated tactics to keep their employees temporarily happy.
But there is a chronic dissatisfaction in the workplace. Gallup’s 2013 State of the American
Workplace study found that as many as 70% of working Americans were unfulfilled with
their jobs, 18% to such an extent that they are actively undermining their co-workers. The
short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes that once worked in the age
of the Industrial Revolution do not translate to the Information Age.
Intrinsic motivation is the new stimulus employees are using to navigate their careers in
the workplace today. Deep satisfaction and genuine happiness comes from the ability to
direct their own lives, to learn and create new things and to do better by themselves and
their world.
The economy is now an ecosystem of mass information moving in different directions at
warp speed and employee solipsism needs to be redirected to achieve greater unity so
that corporate purpose can be achieved. Employers need to reexamine WHY not WHAT
they are doing to reengage employees so that motivation and genuine interest in the
workplace can be redefined.
www.kaptasystems.com
02

As our society
has grown in
complexity, we as
a species have
our organizing
our operating
03
Evolution
The human species has an innate biological drive to survive. It stems not from our external
environment but from the biology of our very brains. The evolution from primate brain to
human brain has evolved over time into a rational, feeling and thinking brain. The limbic
system is where our basic instinct for belonging exists and where our emotions and feel-
ings originate. As we have developed and matured as a species in the workplace, it was
typically common to reward or punish employees for their behavior, specifically in the
last century, when our brains were less developed and more logical in nature. Pavlovian
theory has been used indirectly in the workplace for some time now. It is the concept that
people respond to conditioned reflexes based on external rewards, and it was an original
and innovative concept in the 1900’s but it no longer holds true today.
Manipulating employees with money, rewards and paid time off, typically done so out of
fear to realize results, does not inspire or motivate them, it leaves them unsatisfied and
disgruntled. Humans are more than the sum of their biological urges and have an inherent
tendency to seek out new experiences and challenging problems in order to grow, learn
and become better people.
As our society has grown in complexity, we as a species have evolved and our organizing
system (including our brains) and our operating drive has shifted. The growth of industry
spawned the Industrial Revolution and Pavlovian theory was grounded in this Age and
motivated on the principles that improved performance increases productivity with the
correct externalized reward system. Our basic instincts for motivation and reward still hold
true today, but the meaning behind it has shifted. We still seek reward and avoid punish-
ment but we need to know WHY we are doing it.

Our intrinsic
motivation is to
participate (sense
of belonging), to
give (contribute
to something
larger than self)
challenging
problems at the
workplace, with
our without pay.
04
The information age we live in today has spawned a digital industry that has created a
knowledge-based society that connects people into an intelligent, self-organizing system.
The information industry allows individuals to explore their personalized needs through
this medium and because we all inherently operate on this platform and the Internet itself
is inherently self-organizing, employees today need autonomy to achieve and sustain
satisfaction in the workplace. We are operating now from both the limbic system and the
neocortex region of the brain, which is both rational and feeling.
Our intrinsic motivation is to participate (sense of belonging), to give (contribute to some-
thing larger than self) and to solve challenging problems at the workplace, with our with-
out pay. The overriding message is that these new motivations are intrinsic and need au-
tonomy to survive. Employers need to begin to shift their mindsets and strategy to comply
with the intrinsic desires and aspirations of their employees if they wish to realize results
at the workplace and see long-term growth and proﬁtability.

Even if the group
with extrinsic
their goals,
they still were
their lives. The
attainment of
goals (in this
instance) has
no impact on
can actually
contribute to ill
being.
05
Goals
A group of scholars from Harvard Business School, Northwestern University, University of
Arizona, and the University of Pennsylvania questioned the value behind goal creation.
Because people thrive off creative problem solving at work, goals seem to be a good ac-
cessory to challenging situations. They discovered however that goal setting should be
highly selective. Goals can narrow focus and ultimately self-goals are healthy but goals
imposed by others are not. When an employee creates a personal goal, they are devoted
to attaining their own self mastery, but when goals are imposed on them for sales targets
for instance, it narrows their focus and can in the long run produce unethical behavior be-
cause people end up looking for short cuts to ﬁnish the task or complete the goal.
Edward Deci, Richard Ryan and Christopher Niemiec questioned a group of graduates
from the University of Rochester about their life goals and planned on following up with
them early on in their career to see if their goals had changed in anyway. Some of the
students had “extrinsic motivations,” to become wealthy and famous for instance. Others
had “intrinsic motivations,” to help support the lives of others, to learn and to grow. After
the follow up study, Deci and Ryan found that the people with intrinsic aspirations felt more
satisfaction and subjective well being with their lives, which had lower levels of anxiety
and depression than the students with extrinsic aspirations. Even if the group with extrinsic
goals realized their goals, they still were unsatisﬁed in their lives. The attainment of goals
(in this instance) has no impact on well being and can actually contribute to ill being. They
found that when people do get what they want, it’s not always what they need. What they
discovered is that people need support in creating the right kinds of goals. Companies
and employers must understand this and help their employees better understand the
WHY behind their goals.

06
The consequences of understanding the WHY could rejuvenate our businesses and re-
make our world if done in the right way. Here are some suggestions for creating impactful,
autonomous goals in the workplace.
Set smaller and larger goals so that when it comes time for evaluation, tasks have
inevitably been accomplished.
Create a purpose. Then create goals that support the purpose. Make sure employ-
ees understand how every aspect of their work relates to the larger purpose.
Let employees create their own goals.
Encourage peer-to-peer rewards for goal setting and team building. Kim Horn and
Associates, a civil engineering ﬁrm in North Carolina created a unique system that
encourages company morale. Without asking permission, anyone in the company
can award a $50 bonus to any of their colleagues. It’s in real time and it doesn’t
come from management. Because the reward is from a co-worker, there is more
meaning and less hierarchy involved. This can be woven into group goal setting to
encourage goals to be realized as play, not work.
Writer Sylvia Hewitt has found in her research that the generation of the Boomers and the
Millennialsareredeﬁningwhatsuccessistodayandhowgoalstranslateintosuccess.Both
generations are willing to receive a remixed set of rewards in exchange for more altruistic
outcomes. Neither generation rates money as the most important form of compensation.
Great teams and the ability to give back to society through work were found to be more
important than compensation. These generations are the new “purpose maximizers” and
they represent the dominant pool of employees in the workplace today.

07
Autonomy
Charlottesville based CEO Jeff Gunther launched an experiment in autonomy at Meddius,
one of the software companies he runs. He turned the company into a ROWE, a results-
only-work-environment. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources
executives, came up with the concept of ROWE. In a ROWE environment, people do not
have schedules, they do not have to show up or leave work at any given time, and they
only have to be held accountable for the work to get done. Management they determined
is not about micromanaging people at the office, it’s about creating conditions for people
to do their best work. Gunther found that after a few weeks into his ROWE experiment,
productivity rose and stress declined. He sees his employees as partners, not resources.
The experiment was so successful; he turned it into a full-time, operational component of
his business.
Deci and Ryan concluded that “self-determination” theory is the autonomous quality of
human nature. They found that autonomous motivation involves behaving with a sense of
volition and choice. Controlled motivation, or being managed, involves pressure and a de-
mand towards a speciﬁc outcome. This is not the go-it-alone individualism one may think
of when working alone, it means acting on purpose and with choice. According to behav-
ioral science studies, autonomy promotes better grades, greater persistence at school,
higher productivity, less burnout and greater levels of psychological well being. The Age
of Information calls for a renaissance of self-direction so that employees can reorganize
into a purposeful and autonomous group, working in tandem with each other and alone.
behavioral
autonomy
promotes better
persistence at
school, higher
greater levels of
psychological well
being.

08
Another aspect of autonomy comes with full ownership over projects at the workplace.
Allowing employees to dictate their own projects at work as though they were their own
start-up companies is a new approach to autonomy.
Giving full authority to teams to create what they need to, as long as it aligns with an over-
riding company purpose, is important for intrinsic motivation and autonomy at the work-
place.
Another facet to autonomy is sovereignty over time. Being on the clock diminishes the
motivation to be in the ﬂow. In an experiment with Best Buy and the ROWE formula, they
changed the hourly employees into a more ﬂexible program that resembled salaried em-
ployees. They found that these employees reported better relationships with family and
friends, more company loyalty, and more focus and energy. Productivity increased by
35%, and voluntary turnover was 320 basis points lower than in teams that did not make
the change.
Social networks and mobile applications make it easier for people to connect and be part
of a larger community without relinquishing autonomy. Open source projects, like building
the Firefox open-source project, in which self-organizing teams self-assemble to get work
done without pay is an example of autonomous teams that work in tandem with social
networks and community to produce quality work.
In Delivering Happiness, Zappos found that giving call center employees greater free-
dom over how they handled customers, without using a mandatory call script, gave them
more autonomy over their position and created greater satisfaction at the workplace.
these employees
relationships
company loyalty,
turnover was
lower...

09
Encouraging autonomy at the workplace doesn’t discourage accountability. There is an
inherent assumption that people want to be accountable for their work and if given the
necessary freedom to do so, will help them create a pathway to realize their destiny at the
workplace.
A recent Gallup study found that almost 50% of people were not engaged at work, 20%
were disengaged and the costs of this disengagement was $300 billion /year in lost pro-
ductivity, a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal.
The costs of control, general distrust and lack of flexibility in the workplace is proving to be
costly, unproductive and unsatisfying.
The best predictor of productivity at the workplace is a desire for intellectual challenge.
Scientists motivated by this desire filed more patents than those whose motivation was
money. Challenge can mean different things to different people.
To increase the flow of cleaning staff at hospitals, a hospital examined how they could
better engage their employees. They decided to increase the minimum amount of work
available to them and suggested that they take on new tasks like talking to patients and
helping nurses. The cleaning staff that chose to engage in more tasks reported greater
satisfaction at the workplace and boosted their own view of their skill sets.
Employers need to start asking different questions and reframe the way they manage
their employees. Instead of asking the question of how to get people motivated, they
need to start asking why they want to motivate their employees and why their employees
are intrinsically motivated.
A recent Gallup
almost
of people were
work, were
the costs of this
/year in lost

10
Proﬁt may be the catalyst for most companies today but it should not be the objective and
the purpose should be the end goal. The correlation between money and happiness has
proven to be a weak indicator at the workplace but spending money for other people or
on a cause increases our subjective well being.
Attainment of a set of goals has no correlation to happiness, or the impact on well being.
Success depends on having goals, but speciﬁcally on having the right goals. Employers
need to get clear about purpose and what they want to achieve from the goals that they
should allow their employees to set and maintain.
on having goals,
having the right
goals. Employers
about purpose
want to achieve
from the goals
allow their
employees to set

11
Engagement
Firefox is a free open sourced web based browser that was built by volunteers with no pay
and now has over 150 million users. Open source development depends on intrinsic mo-
tivation. MIT management professor Karim Lakhani and Boston Consulting Group consul-
tant Bob Wolf surveyed 684 open-source developers in North America and Europe about
why they participated in open-source projects. The strongest motive they found was “that
enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working
on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.” There was also a “desire to give
a gift to the programming community.” Open source is one way people are restructuring
what they do along new organizational lines with different motivating frameworks.
Control breeds compliance and autonomy gives birth to engagement. When employees
are truly engaged, they are in a rhythm that self-directs them to a higher purpose. They
perform better and collaborate with others more ﬂuidly.
Engagement also comes from a need to belong. The need to belong is also derived from
the limbic system of our brains. The need to belong is a constant that exists across all
people in all cultures. When we feel like we belong we feel connected and we feel safe.
When a company can articulate why they do the things that they do, there is an inherent
belief system attached to the meaning behind their motivations. The products or services
that they produce is a larger landscape for their belief system as a company and when we
value those beliefs, we feel connected to the company and engage more actively with the
products that they produce.
compliance
gives birth to
engagement

12
This holds true as a consumer and as an employee of a company. When companies and
leaders can articulate what they believe, it gives us a greater sense that we belong with
them. Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that a company can offer something
larger than their own self-gain to drive the organization. Value by deﬁnition is the transfer-
ence of trust. Companies need to talk about the WHY and prove it with the WHAT. Em-
ployees want to be on board with employers that they can trust and engage with. They
need to align with their belief systems, trust that their WHY is purpose driven and feel a
sense of belonging so that they can truly engage their time, energy and work towards a
greater purpose for themselves and for the company.
Trust begins to
emerge when
we have a sense
that a company
can offer
something larger
than their own
the organization.

13
Legacy, Mastery, and Freedom
Humans by their very nature seek purpose. Companies have long considered purpose
only an accessory to ‘real’ work. But things are changing, and our ecosystems in which we
operate have changed and thus so have our brains and the way they assimilate informa-
tion. Today, in the Age of Information, purpose maximizers are taking a stand against proﬁt
maximizers as a guiding principle that things in the workplace must change if employees
are to offer their loyalty, engagement and expertise. A higher purpose must be instilled in
the workplace and that starts with asking the question WHY.
Asking WHY will help to create a new legacy for companies and the way they run their
businesses. It will stem from an intrinsic motivation as opposed to focusing on extrinsic
motivators. When autonomy is granted at the workplace, it gives employees the freedom
to master their work and to take pride in all that they produce. Flexibility and freedom
comes with the ability to choose who you work with, what projects you work on, where
and when you work each day, and getting paid enough to support the lifestyle you want
to live.
A cultural renaissance is happening in the workplace today that is an internal shift in the
way companies run their organizations and treat their employees. Building companies
with purpose will pave the way for how companies will truly succeed and proﬁt in the
coming years.
A cultural
renaissance is
happening in the
that is an internal
shift in the way
companies
run their
organizations
employees.

14
Bibliography
Simon Sinek. Start with Why. Penguin Group, 2009.
Daniel H. Pink. Drive. Penguin Group, 2009.
Tony Hsieh. Delivering Happiness

About KaptaKapta provides executives with a cloud-based sys-
tem to clearly communicate company goals, track every employee’s expected
contribution and review overall status through a real-time dashboard. Headquartered
in Boulder, Colorado, and founded in 2011, Kapta gives executives a clear line of sight
into each team member’s performance and the system’s easy-to-use alignment tools keep
employees on track in less than ﬁve minutes each week. Kapta’s intuitive input process
virtually eliminates “work about work” and instead provides employee alignment
and executive feedback to successfully scale your business.
For more information, please visit
kaptasystems.com

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