As financial markets waver over fears of another U.S. recession, many employees are distracted by how this uncertainty may affect their jobs. While managers may have no control over the wider economy, they can have a dramatic impact on the motivation levels of their team—an impact that may help them block out the distracting macroeconomic noise. These lessons can be drawn from Dan Pink, the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, who joined Rypple for a recent web seminar.

Last week, Fast Company called attention to a video by RSA Animate, which took Pink’s talk from the Ted Conference and crafted an effective visual story.

You can find a link to the video below. Here are three key takeaways:

Money is a Motivator but Far from the Only One

The belief that motivation is based largely on pay has led to the Wall Street ethos of rewarding top performers. But as Pink points out, surprising research has found incentives don’t necessarily lead to better performance.  Four economists (from M.I.T, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Chicago) came to the conclusion that the theory of higher reward = higher performance held true only as long as a task involved mechanical skills. But as soon as conceptual, creative thinking comes into the mix, the opposite was true. Amazingly, more money actually led to a poorer performance. (The researchers were so surprised by this, they took the test to rural India — and came back with the same results).

(For more on the relationship between motivation and pay, read one CEO’s experience here.)

Create the right conditions for self-driven motivation

To get the most out of your workforce, focus on enabling them to develop:

1. Autonomy: the desire to be self-directed.
2. Mastery: the urge to get better at things and improve skills. (Consider the amount of time a person might spend learning to play the guitar or cook, not because they get paid, but because it’s fun and it imbues them with a sense of satisfaction.)
3. Purpose: ensuring the company has a transcendent purpose can make coming to work more enjoyable, and help attract top talent. At the end of the day, people want to work in organizations that make the world a better place.

Give your employees some entrepreneurial freedom

Atlassian, the Australian software company, devotes one day of every quarter to allowing their employees to work on whatever they want, albeit skewed towards their products. At the end of the 24 hours of the so-called “FedEx Day,” everyone shares what they’ve accomplished. This translates into new product ideas and software fixes. Pink argues this radical example shows that one day of autonomy can produce things that otherwise would never have emerged.

Watch the video for more great lessons: