Our life and work, specially the second, are very focused in goals and deadlines. Many of us had terrible experiences putting together these two words: goals and deadlines.
Many companies think that if you have goals and deadlines, and money at the end, without motivation effort inside work environment, you are going to achieve your goals pretty quickly. I don’t think like that. Working with a carrot in front of our noses is not the way to motivate people to work more. So, the question is, how can we motivate people to work more without worrying about the money?

There are some things that we can do, but they are not a recipe for everything. It depends mostly on the people you have working with you or for you. As Alexander Kjerulf says, “the only two things that motivates you at work are your relationships and your work progress”.
1. Relationships: You work more and you will be more motivated if you like your colleagues at work. How many times you asked for help? How many times you shared knowledge? How many times you told stuff that made someone laugh? To improve your relationships at work you can do simple things like:

• Give a good morning like you mean it!;
• Short breaks with your colleagues;
• Ask for help;
• Share something you know that will improve your work environment;
• Do events outside work. For instance invite your colleagues for parties, dinners, football games, etc.

2. Work progress: What is our motivation above all? Help the world and get recognized for it! It is exaggerated but it is true. You are here to leave your mark to the world above all. And if your company knows how to motivate you for this, you will love your job. See google for example, they work to improve our lives, with gmail, calendar, with android or more recently google+. What can we do to motivate people to work more and to achieve their goals quickly and sometimes to handle deadlines pressure? As I said previously this is not a recipe, but are simple things that we can do to improve our work:

• Apply KISS principle (Keep it Simple Stupid). Split your goal into smaller goals. If you have smaller goals and you surpass one by one, you get more motivated, because you notice that your cleaning your list. If you have a long list of goals, you get lost;
• Give your team more meetings to show them the progress they are doing. For instance, SCRUM is an Agile development method which has one meeting day to know the progress of the team;
• Let the experienced people of your team to do workshops on how to make your work more productive, sharing their knowledge on how to handle big sums of work;
• Have a constantly updated team wiki about the business/technology you are working on.

Conclusion

Nowadays, motivation is one the most important aspects that changes our work environments everyday. To have your team or your colleagues motivated with the job they are doing, you have to join the professional and your personal life. If you go to your work with “friends”, it is easier to handle pressure and deadlines, because you are not alone and you have people that will certainly help you.