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ОглавлениеChapter 1
What really does motivate people?
Introduction
In this chapter, we will explore why people may not report being ‘happy’ or ‘engaged’ at work, and we will draw on thinking from behavioural science to determine what might actually motivate our people. We will discuss the concept of ‘meaning’ at work; what is it, and where can we all get some? And we’ll touch on the ever-debated topic of money as a motivator. The toolkit in this chapter is there to support you in exploring what motivates your people (your employees, or perhaps your own team, or further still, yourself). This is a hugely broad topic that is central to how we build people-focused cultures and put the human back into our HR plans.
Drawing on behavioural science to respond to our ‘global epidemic’ of disengagement
Apparently, we’re operating within a ‘global epidemic’ of workplace disengagement (Gallup, 2018). It all sounds pretty awful. Where do we go next? We’ve been investing in ‘employee engagement’ interventions for at least a couple of decades, and nothing much seems to have shifted. If we’re trying to create sustainable change in our workplaces, and I’m assuming that’s the end game, I’m still pondering to myself, ‘What is engagement?’ and ultimately, ‘How is it going to help us to achieve that?’ ‘Do we need to go back to the drawing board, and ultimately back to the evidence?’
Employee engagement is nothing new. And so much of it is based on shaky evidence. If we’re pondering ‘where next?’, I wonder if we should look to a couple of fields that have existed all along. It could be that drawing on existing and refined tools and models from the world of occupational psychology could support how we ‘engage’ and motivate our people? There’s a difference between seeing employee engagement as a programme of interventions and seeing it as a long-term outcome built through a deep understanding of the needs and motivation of real people. To pretend we can create ‘business success’ on the basis of employee engagement interventions such as responding to a survey at a snapshot in time, or through free fruit and table tennis tables, is, quite frankly, bonkers. I would suggest we need to slow down, stop over-egging our interventions, and reflect on the evidence out there.
So, what factors might create meaning in the workplace?
Many years of ‘climate surveys’, providing a snapshot of employee feedback or ‘mood’, suggest that line managers, and probably also the HR teams, so often fail to understand what will retain and what will cause an employee to leave an organisation. Tony Schwartz (2016)4 suggests that satisfied people who report finding meaning in their work typically also report feeling ‘in charge’. Schwartz noted that satisfied people he observed achieved a measure of autonomy and discretion at work, and they used that autonomy and discretion to achieve a level of expertise. They learned new things, developing both as employees and as people, and they experienced what Schwartz termed ‘growth’.
When asked what motivates them at work, employees reliably answer the same things, in generally the same order. When managers are asked what they think motivates employees, they too generally answer consistently, but just with completely different items.
The key engagement factors, often cited by employees:
1. Appreciation of work done – a simple thank you or recognition for their contribution. Our reaction to this in HR has been to build systems that can pop a thank you to people on email. I’m far from being a luddite, but I do find it interesting how we are just itching to depersonalise what could just be a simple human connection with a few simple words thrown in.
2. Being involved and influencing how work is done – another one that makes perfect sense but is missing in many work environments. I’ve witnessed this lack of involvement many times and it is particularly prevalent in middle management, where managers may feel disconnected from strategy development or planning but be expected to ‘do’ what is set by others.
3. The organisation extending care and loyalty – we can codify compassion into HR policies, but ultimately what really engages employees is their line managers and colleagues responding to their individual, personal and emotional needs when it really matters. Showing empathy and compassion is what makes us human, and is the basis of healthy human relationships, so why would we expect any of the factors that sit below to come before it?
Key engagement factors, as very often envisaged by line managers and HR professionals:
1. Pay – in the eyes of many organisations, engagement rests solely on a cost of living salary increase, with occasional ‘rewards’ for good behaviour.
2. Job security – that old adage: ‘as long as we don’t sack them/make them redundant, they’re singing on their way to work.’ Unlikely.
3. Promotion – the pathways to promotion are often unclear or misunderstood in organisations. It should be a relief to us all then that this isn’t the top motivator for employees.
We often plan our engagement interventions in response to the three priorities above, and often therefore really miss the mark. What else motivates our employees?
Opportunities to grow
Whilst having ‘a great team’ around you might motivate you to work even harder, opportunities to grow and develop are often cited as being reasons for employees to remain in an organisation. According to a BambooHR survey of more than 1,000 workers, a lack of opportunities is the largest contributor to people starting to seek those opportunities elsewhere. This seems obvious, and the very reason of course that we invest in learning and development and talent interventions. However, how far do we tailor discussions to the individual? How far do we create meaningful career discussions that link where someone wants to be, to where they are now and consider motivating and potentially exciting opportunities to bridge that gap or to take the aspiration even further? Do our HR processes facilitate a meaningful conversation for each employee, or do they facilitate a tick box exercise to complete a process, or worse still simply to produce a rating to pop into a spreadsheet?
Engaging, interesting work
Employee engagement and job satisfaction are not the same thing. An employee can love his or her job, have fantastic pay and colleagues, whilst still dragging themselves into work every day to do a job they find painfully dull. I exaggerate, but we all know someone who stayed in a job far too long because they say they ‘really liked the people’… until that just wasn’t enough anymore. When we’re creating HR processes and ways of working that foster meaningful conversations for employees, we need to ensure these conversations explore how that person can engage further with their work. How do we focus on enhancing meaning in the present, and not just looking forward to a ‘career plan’ for the future? It’s wonderful to have a five-year plan mapped out, but ever-deferred engagement doesn’t help anyone to feel happy at work. This is where creative job design, stretch assignments or stretch objectives, fostering innovation and creativity in the workplace and encouraging flexibility beyond the ‘bum on a seat’ needs to be parked in yesteryear.
The search for meaning at work, and the link to social contact and control
So how can we find greater meaning at work, and why does this matter to us in HR? Like other fields, HR professionals often seek new shiny objects (ideas) that will help people to perform better. For these new insights to shift from distractions to sustainable, value-added practices, they need to be examined more rigorously. Spending time exploring the evidence-base for an intervention, particularly when it’s new and shiny so doesn’t have one yet, is often placed into the ‘too hard box’ by HR practitioners. I’ve certainly been guilty of this in the past, perhaps because the intervention just seems so obviously positive. How could it possibly fail to increase people’s job satisfaction? However, spending time upfront defining your hypothesis, or rather what you’re trying to affect or explore, based on hopefully at least a bit of an understanding of the current evidence-base, will stand us all in good stead to avoid spending a lot of time and money on quick fixes that fix very little.
We’ve established that people are searching for meaning; a search for meaning in life in general, but this applies just as much to the workplace. If we are all hankering after meaning in our work, why have so many people got jobs where, quite frankly, pay is the only real motivator for showing up? Pay, or the fear of not receiving any pay, of course. Try as they might to find meaning, challenge and room for autonomy, this work situation often leaves them looking for just the bare basics of a salary. Gallup research, which some rate and some question for its reliability, has found that 90% of people surveyed spend half their waking lives doing things they would rather not be doing at places they would rather not be; they’re working in jobs they despise, or at best tolerate. I’ve been challenged on this topic a few times when discussing how we can create meaning and social connection in all organisations. One challenge came from an old colleague who asked me: ‘How on earth can you think people packing sanitary towels in a factory are searching for meaning from their work?’ You’ll see I haven’t abridged the question for you. I really can think that, and I do, and it’s based on a whole host of research on the importance of social connection. For a full deep-dive into the topic, please refer to fantastic books in social psychology such as The Social Animal, by Elliot Aronson.5 For a more anecdotal approach from me, please read on. And please note that I don’t share my stories as ‘pseudo-evidence’. They are stories to illustrate my own experience, and often in an attempt to bring the research I am citing to life a little for you. Our next chapter focuses on evidence-based practice in HR, and the irony of this is not lost on me.
So, how does engagement and job satisfaction apply to people who aren’t in typical high-flying careers, or what in the United Kingdom at least were once known as ‘white collar jobs’? I worked as a chambermaid cleaning up sick, owl poo (yes, somehow this is true) and goodness knows what else at the weekend and during holidays before starting university. I was, broadly speaking, motivated in that role. It wasn’t just the money; I wasn’t rolling in it as a sixteen-year-old chambermaid. The camaraderie and the laughter amongst the chambermaids, the porters and the people in the laundry was brilliant. It was hard work in every sense, but I got up after sometimes two hours’ sleep from a night of dancing to carry hefty hoovers up and down flights of stairs at 8 am. I was engaged. Or I was when I wasn’t hiding in cleaning cupboards eating leftover pastries. (How did I end up in HR? Goodness knows.) Meaning at work comes from a wide range of factors, but we can tap into this and make virtually any workplace more engaging and more ‘human’ for our people. Why do I now labour this point? I value fairness and compassion above all else, and I have a strong ‘elitism radar’. I don’t want to write a book that seeks to bring humanity into only the head offices of the richest companies in the world, though goodness they need it, and if I’m honest I miss working somewhere with a swimming pool in the building. This is, and should be, for everyone. I’m not so naïve to think that people working in unsafe factories on less than the legal national minimum wage work for people who are about to pick up this book. We have another fight to fight for those people, and it’s beyond the realms of this book. We need to put the human back into HR for these people. It’s not all about the people who get free food in swanky offices – we’re designing the future of work for all, and these people sadly aren’t the majority.
So, what does motivate people and what can we learn from this in HR? The behavioural economist, Dan Ariely,6 has said that ‘when we think about how people work, the naïve intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze’. In line with the motivation theories of the greats such as Maslow,7 Ariely conducted research in 2008 that found we are motivated by far more than money and comfort incentives, such as free fruit, or even by the offer of working and being paid for less hours through flexible working. We are driven by the meaning found in our work, by the support and acknowledgement of others and, interestingly, also by how challenging the task is. Ariely found that the harder the task is, the prouder we are in achieving this, and this research supports my point above that people are complex creatures and our motivations for joining a company, performing well there and then choosing to stay can be wide-ranging and complex. I have shared feeling motivated and potentially ‘happy’ as a chambermaid. This could have been because it was only a couple of days a week at most and represented disposable income rather than my life’s work. I don’t know. I certainly didn’t feel the same job satisfaction in my foray as a call centre worker. I lasted four days, four long days, before calling the agency and saying I couldn’t go back. The crunch factor for me wasn’t even clocking on or off the phones to go to the toilet (and having this logged as a ‘statistic’, rather than a pretty basic human function), or the fact that I was trying to sell some phone-related gadget to people who neither wanted nor needed it. No, the crunch factor was watching our statistics put on the whiteboard and our Call Centre Manager jumping up and down when someone exceeded their targets. I honestly couldn’t have cared less. There was zero meaning in that role for me, and zero social contact to bolster the lack of meaning in the activities themselves. Social exchanges were precisely timed, and actively discouraged. I know call centre environments have moved on greatly in 20 years, but back then they were the battery farms of the workplace. Twenty-eight long hours. And please bear in mind that I managed to find joy cleaning up after people in an expensive hotel, serving food in a Chinese restaurant on a wage of next-to-nothing and developing endless photos in a shop. Social contact and an element of control – this shouldn’t be the rocket science of effective job design.
Revisiting the impact of pay on how we motivate our people
Can money be a strong motivator? We know that money is a ‘hygiene factor’; not enough and we feel demotivated, but increasing amounts will not result in ever-increasing happiness. However, Ariely, who I introduced a moment ago, has found in controlled laboratory experiments that the less appreciated we feel our work is, the more money we want to be paid to do it. So of course, as always suspected, money matters a great deal to people – however, it is the value it represents on our worth that makes a difference here. This is why paying people equitably, when they’ve performed well, or their role has grown significantly, really matters. It’s not the numbers on the payslip, it’s the value you are placing on their worth at work. I will share a specific example with you. Ariely conducted a study, published in Psychological Science,8 where he gave students at MIT a piece of paper filled with random letters and asked them to find the pairs of identical letters on the paper. Each time they did the activity, they were offered less money than the previous time to play. Those in the first group wrote their names on their sheets and handed them to the experimenter, who simply said ‘Uh huh’ before putting it in a pile. People in the second group didn’t write down their names, and the experimenter put their sheets in a pile without looking at them. People in the third group had their work shredded immediately upon completion. What did they find? People whose work was shredded needed twice as much money as those whose work was acknowledged in order to keep doing the task. People in the second group, whose work was saved but ignored, needed almost as much money as those whose work was shredded. Ariely demonstrated the sizeable impact that ignoring people’s contribution and effort can have on their motivation, and this has been supported in numerous studies since. Of course, we may overinflate just how valuable our own work is, and no one wants to be average. However, it seems very clear that acknowledging the contribution and performance of a person is a basic motivational need, and one which really shouldn’t be so hard to achieve or to facilitate in HR.
Taking steps to tailor reward and recognition to individual needs
What steps can we take to move beyond the obvious yet ineffectual motivators to tailor our offering to the needs of our people? There will be many, and the answer to that question is probably a book in itself. I will share below some small nudges that will move us in the right direction.
• Consider how you can build a feedback culture within your organisation. This doesn’t need to be attached to a big marketing campaign or a training programme. Tell people why it’s important, help them to understand what good looks like through role-modelling, and reinforce it through acknowledging them when they do it. Start in the HR department, and then share your success stories and learnings with others.
• Acknowledge, appreciate and recognise people, role-modelling this within your own team when people are doing more than expected, or when they’re taking on more responsibility. We don’t typically have endless money to give discretionary pay increases, and it wouldn’t necessarily be fair of HR to encourage such practices, but valuing others’ contribution is even more important than attaching a financial incentive to that. Remember the research I just shared stating when people feel undervalued, they may want to be paid more as a result? This is important stuff.
• Ask people. Engagement surveys serve a useful purpose within organisations. They are a feedback mechanism that provides a snapshot in time, or sometimes real-time feedback, for how a person is experiencing their team ‘climate’. Engagement surveys are not a measure of organisational culture, but it never fails to surprise me just how far some HR teams are willing to go to extrapolate the results and to suggest cultural change is underpinned by their 30–40 question employee survey. It’s just a survey. Absolutely use the data to inform your next steps but get out there and speak to people. Ask people what motivates them, explore their values and how closely the organisation is meeting their needs.
The number of articles and books on happiness at work has grown sizably over recent years. There is something that feels so obviously good about chasing the elusive ‘happiness at work’, or perhaps something so obviously bad about saying we shouldn’t do so. Isn’t it obvious that we should feel happiness at work? Isn’t that what the term ‘work-life blend’ was created for? Happiness has been the gold at the end of the rainbow for some time in business journals, but it appears that happiness may just be a symptom of something much more important – meaning. Whilst happiness and meaning are related, it isn’t always the case that the high presence of one should signal the high presence of the other. Findings from the work of Rd. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina examined self-reported levels of happiness and meaning, and found that 75% of people reported high scores on levels of happiness, but low on levels of meaning. Further research has found that employees who find meaning in their work are three times more likely to stay with their organisations than those who don’t find meaning in their work. We’re back to one of the basic premises of motivation theory. It’s important to reiterate my earlier point though: it’s not all about finding meaning from the incredible impact you’re achieving at work. Whilst pay is certainly not a core motivator, some people can only find meaning from their pay and how they can use that pay to support or to stay afloat in their personal life. It would be a pretty romantic notion to pretend that this doesn’t matter, and anyone who isn’t living ‘hand to mouth’, as we say in the UK, in a time of high austerity, is very fortunate. That said, our focus should always be on bringing everyone up, and for HR this should mean bringing everyone up to a way of working that has dignity, fulfils social needs and seeks to be motivating.
Summary
This chapter has been an introduction or indeed a reminder to what motivates people, and what has some potential to motivate but is never going to be the silver bullet, that is, money. I have no doubt you knew much of this. The reason I’ve kicked off a book about putting the ‘human’ back into Human Resources with a chapter about human motivation despite knowing that this is ‘nothing new’ is that we often forget that humans have wide-ranging needs and motivations. If it’s not new, it’s still not practised in organisations. We’ve made some headway through designing flexible benefits schemes and in designing workplaces to support social contact and collaboration, but the majority of organisations still exist in hierarchies with limited delegated authorities between the layers or even open communication and involvement. As a profession, Human Resources can play a huge role in re-examining and re-communicating the ‘person case’ for ensuring our processes, practices and ways of working facilitate social contact, empowerment, autonomy and control where achievable, and an approach tailored to the needs of individuals.
The next chapter will explore how we define and test the strategies and interventions that will create person-centred workplaces where people can do their best work. We will discuss the importance of gathering evidence to make informed decisions for how we develop and shape our HR strategies and plans. We would never make a business decision, or shouldn’t, without looking at objective fact and logic. So, why do we chase after the latest fad when it comes to people management and development? Why are we still relying on ‘engagement surveys’ and performance management systems that fail to increase anything other than frustration in many organisations? I’m endlessly inspired by behavioural science and by research that seeks to understand human behaviour so that we can apply this to make our workplaces more effective for all. You and I don’t need to spend our lives thinking up and conducting this research, but my goodness what a missed opportunity if we don’t even know it’s there or take the time to explore it. I’m a bona fide geek and proud of it. I will be delighted if you read the next chapter and it ignites your ‘inner geek’ a little.
Toolkit A: Engaging your people
1. Explore your purpose or intent
o Consider why you’re focusing on what motivates your people. Bear with me here. It may seem bleedingly obvious but defining your purpose will guide where you focus your attention when we move to information gathering. Is this because it is a general expectation of the HR department? Is it because the market is competitive in terms of finding or retaining talented people? Is it because your senior leadership want to be known for creating a culture where people are valued and respected? Whatever it is, note it down.
o Test and agree your purpose with others. Is this what you should be aiming for, or prioritising, as a business at the moment? Defining and agreeing on this matters: when you go out to speak to people, which we’ll come onto next, this will be how you introduce your curiosity. You’re defining it at this stage because people have exceptionally strong BS detectors and it helps to be able to share your intent honestly and openly with them. If the honest answer is that no one other than you cares, but you’re delving into this to build that person case, that’s absolutely fine too (or it is for the purpose of this task).
2. Develop and test your understanding of your people – what motivates them?
o Ask them. Spend time speaking with your people, your business leaders and HR colleagues to understand what motivates differing groups of people in your organisation. Talk to real people, people you wouldn’t usually connect with, at this stage. If you think you’ve done this, stay curious and see what else you can find out.
o Listen and apply professional curiosity. Do you observe and hear differing needs and motivations depending on professional groupings, personal demographics or office location? How do you know this?
o Delve deeper. Consider other engagement data you have to draw on – climate surveys, team feedback, leavers’ interviews, ad hoc feedback and feedback or issues raised through employee relations cases. What do these tell you about people’s needs and how they are or are not being met?
o Look for patterns and themes with someone else. Consider the patterns and themes you find across both the quantitative and qualitative data you’ve gathered. Show it to another trusted person, in confidence naturally, and ask them what they see. You’re trying to explore the less obvious points – what does someone see from the ‘outside in’?
3. Sense-making and prioritisation
o Start to make sense of what you’ve found. You’ve defined why exploring what motivates your own people matters, and you’ve explored this yourself and with others. You’ll have hopefully found out some really interesting information or refuted/supported what you thought you already knew. Fantastic. And, ‘so what’? It’s now time for synthesising your information and some sense-making. I love this stage. It’s creative and allows you to consider practical steps for making your people feel valued, respected and motivated at work.
o Isolate your ‘engagement priorities’ or the differences that will make a difference to how you motivate your people. For example, you want to retain people because you have a high turnover rate and it’s disruptive and expensive. Your people are motivated by being involved in decisions that matter to them, they want to use their professional expertise to create impact, and certain teams are motivated by the opportunity to innovate and to develop their external profile. Great. But none of this happens. You’ve isolated your engagement priorities.
4. In deciding your interventions, keep it simple. A few tips.
o Ask real people for their opinions. You’re not Netflix or whoever else, so don’t build your engagement interventions based on somebody else’s slide deck. Refer to others’ ideas for inspiration but ask real-life people wandering around your offices what they would like to see.
o Remember technology is an enabler, not the ‘solution’. There are many tools available to support us to communicate better at work. In the same way that clicking a ‘like’ thumbs-up button on social media isn’t the same as actually taking meaningful social action, an employee communication mechanism that isn’t mirrored in open communication within the organisation will have limited impact. Technology enables cultural change, but your purpose needs to be achieved through careful consideration of how you can adapt your processes, ways of working, and most importantly, how your leadership can lead the way.
o You’ve gathered information and translated it into possibilities. This now needs to be owned and led by your leaders. Engagement and motivation aren’t an HR issue – as we know, it’s a business issue and therefore needs to be led by your leaders.
