Motivating, incentivizing and rewarding people is always a challenge in larger organizations as people tend to be motivated by different things.
When it comes to using software, it's crucial to keep things as simple and as easy as possible for everyone involved. If there's too much complexity or people feel like they need to use a lot of time with some "IT system", they typically won't end up using it. Viima is designed to be as quick and easy to use as possible and is proven to be loved by even those who've said that they "hate all new IT systems".
If we put the software angle aside and focus on the bigger picture, it's usually best to motivate participation by offering intrinsic incentives. The nature of these incentives can vary from the opportunity to make one’s job easier to career opportunities or simply the chance to have a say in larger company affairs. The reason intrinsic incentives typically work better at motivating creativity than say, extrinsic incentives like cash prizes, is that they appeal to a person’s inner will of doing things. This typically leads to more passionate work, which in turn leads to higher quality.
Extrinsic incentives often lose their appeal after a short while, which isn’t ideal when you really want to make lasting changes, such as making your organization's culture more innovative and engaging. Having said that, there's also a time and place for using extrinsic incentives, it's often just recommended to not use them solely.
The most common sources of intrinsic motivation are:
Meaningfulness: The feeling of doing something important that adds real value according to your personal priorities.
Choice: Perceiving a possibility to influence your work.
Competence: Feeling that you perform your tasks well and are a valuable member of the community.
Progress: Being able to improve your own capabilities and seeing that your work really has an impact on the current state of affairs.
Again, people are different and so are the triggers that motivate them, which might make it difficult to come up with an incentive structure that works for everyone. In such cases, we typically recommend trying out different kinds of incentives and seeing which ones yield the best results in your organization. It is, after all, the long-term that you're really interested in.
For a more thorough take on the topic, please refer to our post: Intrinsic Sources of Motivation