This is a transcription of my linkedin pulse post you can find here.

The first time I asked myself this question, I was working in a top ranked university in my home country. Although it was a very nice job with full benefits, the best time in my typical work day was at 6:00pm when I headed to small catholic/non-profit University to do more or less the same work for a fraction of the salary.

I discovered the answer to this question several years later taking the Kevin Werbach’s Gamification course. In one of his lectures, specifically when he was talking about motivation, he exposed the following experiment:

In a elementary school, two sets of kids were separated in two classrooms. In both they were asked to make drawings, but in one classroom for each drawing the student delivered he got paid 25 cents, and in the other classroom not.

At the end of the experiment, the kids who got paid delivered a lot drawings whose quality was much lower than that of the drawings of the kids who received no money. But maybe the most remarkable finding was observed when they notified the students that the test was over, and noticed that the kids who got paid just left the classroom while the second group stayed making more drawings freely as they were enjoying the activity.

When I moved here to the US to work as a software engineer, what I found in the startup world was a lot of competition of who offers the best Mac computer or a fridge full of beer in order to attract the best of best, but what about the things that intrinsically motivates a talented guy to give his best for the job?

How to effectively motivate teams and how Gamification could be useful? This is the line of thinking I’m developing with my partner Javier Velasquez, and I expect to develop these ideas in future posts.