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
