‘I don’t believe that anyone can produce their best work unless they’re motivated’ – Switch CEO

Switch CEO Richard Muscat Azzopardi has shared his insights and reflections into motivation and discipline, particularly as the company has successfully transitioned to a four-day workweek after four years of effort.

Writing on LinkedIn, Mr Muscat Azzopardi comments that not everyone can be self-motivated without a goal in mind. For instance, he can’t bring himself to get out of bed to go for a run if he didn’t think of the benefits he would get out of the exercise.

“The benefits could be many, I could simply enjoy the run, I could be training for a race, I could want to lose weight – no matter what the benefit is, I would definitely not do something if I didn’t see the benefit in it, even if it’s a long-term one,” he continued.

Add to it an element of discipline, he remarked that the same applied to everything one does at work.

“Even more importantly, this applies to everything our people do at work. I don’t believe that anyone can produce their best work unless they’re motivated. And no, fear is not motivation,” he said.

Addressing leaders in his community, he asks them to think hard about what they are doing to motivate people.

He noted that not everyone shares the same motivation: while some are driven by the desire to earn more money, others are motivated by the pursuit of brilliant work or by leaving a positive impact on the world, and some combine all three.

He believes that leaders should consistently feed this motivation. “Make sure that you can motivate most of your team with the same goals. These should be achievable, and it should be clear to your team what it would take to reach and to maintain them.”

For the team at Switch, the “big audacious goal” was moving to a four-day workweek, with the whole team knowing that this was the goal from day one.

He notes that every member of the team knew what it would take to be able to achieve the shorter workweek and worked hard to be able to achieve it.

“It has taken us four years to get here, but it feels so good to finally be here, and now that we’re here we’re out to prove that we can run an even better business with four days a week than most other businesses working five days a week,” he added.

Furthermore, he said that having the goal of providing a better service than anyone else is a big motivator that gets him out of bed in the morning. “It’s what drives our team to do better, to be more efficient, to help our clients reach their goals quicker,” he concluded.