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
