Sarah Aviram, HR leader and expert on remote work
Sarah Aviram found herself at a crossroads in her career in 2018. She was the Director of Talent Development at a tech company in New York and while she loved the company she worked in, she was feeling uninspired by the work itself. She didn’t know if she could find a way to re-engage with her current job, whether it was time to leave to try something new, or if she should take some time off to travel for a while.
Meanwhile, she was researching future work trends and learned that remote work would become common practice for organizations globally. Sarah then came up with the idea that would change the course of her career and life: why not work remotely while traveling? She figured that a change of environment would certainly make her feel inspired to do her job again.
In a bold move, she convinced her CEO to let her work remotely for 1 year on the premise that she researched the challenges and opportunities that remote work arrangements could present for the company.
Two months later, she was on a one-way flight to Peru. In 2019, she lived and worked remotely from 12 countries in 12 months.
The first few months were incredible. She attended a work meeting from a co-working space in Lima, Peru before heading out to surf at sunset on a regular Tuesday. She launched a work program from a pool in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, and negotiated a contract from a cafe in Hanoi, Vietnam. She made friends with remote workers and digital nomads from all over the world. Some were looking for a massive lifestyle change while others were trying to make a boring job more tolerable by escaping to an exotic location.
However, once the honeymoon period was over and the novelty faded, Sarah realized that something was still missing. Being able to work from anywhere was only a band-aid solution for a much bigger challenge: not being motivated by the work itself.
Just like Sarah, many remote workers she met thought that having the freedom and flexibility to work from anywhere would make them feel happier and more motivated at work. But then they found themselves working from a beach in Bali still feeling stuck and unfulfilled.
Sarah spent the next year doing field research, focus groups, and surveys with remote workers, and wrote a best-selling book about her findings, Remotivation: The Remote Worker’s Ultimate Guide to Life-Changing Fulfillment, published right as most of the world went remote in 2020! She also shares this story in a powerful TEDx talk, Does more freedom at work mean more fulfillment?
In her book, Sarah identifies six key motivators - or “remotivators” as she likes to call them, that drive our career decisions and ultimately, determine our sense of fulfillment at work:
- Money is a motivator to work when your reasons for working are to satisfy a specific financial need or desire.
- Identity can motivate you when you have an emotional connection to what the work means about who you are or what you value.
- Routines can be motivating because they can provide you with a sense of comfort and stability.
- Growth is when the work allows you to develop skills or have experiences that contribute to your development.
- Impact is when you work because you feel your work provides value that you believe is important.
- Joy is when you love the work itself. The work is its own reward as it’s enjoyable, creative, and interesting.
Sarah found that the people who were the most motivated and performing at their best at work minimized pressure related to their money, identity, and routines and prioritized opportunities for growth, impact, and joy - regardless of where they worked from.
Fast forward a few years and one massive pandemic remote work experiment later, a recent McKinsey study found that despite the freedom and flexibility of remote or hybrid set-ups, employees were leaving organizations due to these top three reasons:
- Lack of development and advancement opportunities
- Lack of meaningful work
- Unsustainable work expectations
This study confirmed Sarah’s finding: while having the choice of where to work can contribute to one’s overall job satisfaction, what people really need to feel fulfilled is to do the work they actually want to be doing.
Employees and managers need to have more proactive and robust career development conversations that dive into the real reasons employees aren’t engaged at work. Here are some questions managers can ask their team members:
- Money: What type of rewards are used as motivation in our team/org? Which ones work best for you? What ideas do you have on how to improve them?
- Identity: Do you feel like you can be your authentic self at work? In what ways can I/we encourage you to be more so?
- Routines: What routines do you have that don’t serve your goals or the team's goals? What unhelpful work habits do you find difficult to change?
- Growth: What skills or capabilities do you want to develop? What experiences do you want to have?
- Impact: Who do you want to benefit from your work and what impact do you want to make on the organization, clients, or community at large? What context/information do you need to better understand the value your work provides?
- Joy: What kind of work do you enjoy or gives you energy? What kind of work would you like to do more of?
Sarah asked herself these same questions when she was feeling happy yet unfulfilled with her life working from a beach. She realized that by reducing her largest expense - her high rent payments in New York City - she could minimize the pressure she felt to keep earning larger amounts of money to maintain her lifestyle. She recognized that a fancy corporate title was no longer something she needed to feel good about herself. She also noticed that she really didn’t enjoy doing tactical work routines, like preparing reports no one ever read and until this point she hadn’t considered alternative solutions to help her get these off her plate.
Once she managed the relationship with her money, identity, and routines she could then focus on opportunities for joy, impact, and growth.
Sarah then discovered that she felt joy from researching remote work and interviewing remote workers about their lives. She saw that she made a significant impact on thousands of employees by facilitating workshops that gave them specific actions they could take to thrive at work. She also found growth in figuring out how to distill all the experience and knowledge she accumulated in her extensive HR career into an easily digestible book for remote and hybrid workers.
Sarah’s feeling quite fulfilled these days as she now has her own company helping organizations re-motivate their remote and hybrid employees. You can learn more about her work here.
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