When I teach students about motivation, one of the things I often get them to do is just to write down about the jobs where they'd be most motivated and the jobs where they've been least motivated and to tell me what's the difference between those roles. We spend the last 20-25 minutes talking about pay. One thing that's really interesting to me is, why are you doing this? A very small proportion of them, maybe 10 percent, will talk about how they were paid and trying to explain why some jobs are motivating and others weren't. Most won't. Instead, what they will talk about is the work itself. Although we think a lot about extrinsic motivation, there's no doubt that is important. It also seems to be that what people find most motivating and what's really central to driving effort, is intrinsic motivation. That is the rewards that we get from the work itself. Now, at this point, you might again be saying, "Great, so I don't need to worry about pay for performance. People don't care how I pay them. The work will be a reward enough in itself, so I don't need to worry about motivation." That's not what I'm saying. The work can be a reward in itself. When I talk to my students, some of them have had these tremendously rewarding jobs. Some of them have had these tremendously de-motivating jobs. The difference is in the way that the work is setup, the job is designed, the differences in what they are doing day-to-day. What we really want to ask ourselves is, how do we create jobs that will be motivating to people? How do we create jobs that people come into work, be happy with what they're doing and actually want to do their job? How do we do that? One way to think about this is using expectancy theory. Now, anybody remember expectancy theory? Really? I talked about it like 20 minutes ago. Come on. Who remembers expectancy theory? Yeah. You at the back there. Yeah. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Expectancy theory. It was this idea that motivation is shaped by three things. Is expectancy. If I work hard, will my effort shape my performance? Instrumentality, if I perform, will that lead to rewards? Valence, how much do I value those rewards? Let's apply that to job design. Essentially work backwards for me. With job design, with intrinsic motivation, what we're thinking about is the idea that I'm actually getting rewards from the work itself. It's not what I'm getting paid, it's not my prospects promotion. It's actually completing the work. Well, why would that be valuable? What rewards do I think I could get from the work itself? Mainly broadly two things, two reasons, why we might find the work valuable. One is that we find the work meaningful. Most of us, want meaning in our lives, we want the idea that we are contributing to something greater than ourselves. We want the idea that what we're doing is worthwhile. It's making the world a better place. If we feel that our work can achieve that, we are likely to value it. One thing we might value is that meaning, that sense of making the world a better place. The other thing that I think we often value is that the work is interesting. That we're developing skills, that we're stretching ourselves, that it's engaging. One of the things when people look at engagement, one of the things that they find tends to lead to engagement, is being stretched. We talked earlier of expectancy theory, we don't want work to be impossible because if it is, why bother? Can't be too difficult, but it can't be too easy either. This seems to be evidence that people tend to be most engaged when the work is a close match for their own skills. When the demands of the work are about the same as the skills that we have, we find it easy to get absorbed in it. Too hard, we burn out. Too easy, we get bored. We want the work to be challenging but not impossible, and we want it to be meaningful. What does this mean in practice? People think about three different characteristics of the work that might give it value in itself. One is task significance. Is the work meaningful? Is it worthwhile? Do I feel that I am making a difference? I am doing something that is personally important to me. Second one is task identity. It's often hard to see that significance when I'm working on a very small corner or something. If I get to see one whole project or one whole task through from start to finish, then I'm more likely to see that as meaningful. Do I get to work on the whole picture? Then the third thing, if I want to be stretched, if I want to be engaged, then I need to not just be doing the same thing over and over again, I need to be accessing a variety of skills. Within that skill variety is something else that we value in the work itself. If we want people to be motivated by the work to find value in doing the work itself, it needs to have tossed significance task identity in particular skill variety. But expectancy theory tells us that's not enough. We need to value the work, but we also need to feel that what we are doing is actually achieving these things. Particularly if what I want is work that's worthwhile, I need to know not just the work could be worthwhile, but what I'm doing is achieving something. Through my work, I'm don't just have the potential to do something worthwhile but I'm making the world a better place day in, day out. Being able to see those tangible achievements simple, we described that as feedback, seeing the results of our action. We're going to find the work more motivating when we can actually see those results, rather than if it's just in theory, if this job went well would be doing some meaningful, but we can't really tell because we have no idea how this work when. The third piece then, the final piece in expectancy theory is this expectancy. This idea that if I work harder, it's going to change my performance. If I work hard, I'm going to do this job well, if I work less hard, I'm not going to do this very well. How does that relate to job design? But one piece that people think is important that is autonomy, the sense of ownership. If I'm just following a script, then I feel very little ownership of the outcome. I don't feel like if I work hard, the outcomes can be very different to if I don't work very hard because I'm just doing what somebody else told me to do, I don't feel a lot of personal responsibility for whether this is achieved or not. If on the other hand I have more freedom discretion in what I'm doing and how I designed the work, then ultimately if it goes well, I feel ownership and if it goes badly, I feel ownership as well. We think that when we give people more autonomy, more freedom in how they're doing the work. They feel that ownership, they feel a clear link between working hard and getting those outcomes and as a consequence, they feel more motivated as well. What we have here is this job design model classic things that we think shaped how motivating the workers. Level of autonomy, the amount of feedback I get. Do I get see the results of my actions? Where there's task significance, task identity, and skill variety in the work. These are a nice set of arguments about the features of work that will make it more versus less motivating. Though they weren't, yeah, they really do. There have been a lot of studies that have explored the relationship between these things and how people feel about their work. The numbers that I've put on this slide, the correlation between these attributes of work and how people rate their satisfaction with the job. What I hope you'll notice is that these numbers are frankly substantially higher than I think any of the other correlations that I've shown you over the course of some set of videos. A lot of time I've been looking at numbers of about 0.2, 0.3 and pointing at them and showing them that really shows something's going on, that shows this important in shaping how people behave. Here I'm showing numbers the autonomy a correlation of 0.7 feedback and skill variety 0.6-0.7.. Really what this shows is if you can show me a job where someone reports that they have autonomy in the job, they see the results of their actions. They get to employ a variety of skills. They're going to say they enjoy that job. If you show me somebody in a job that doesn't have those things, they'll say they don't enjoy that job. It's a set of tools to understand what it is that makes people find jobs engaging, this is a very nice summary I think. What's particularly valuable about this list? Is it also gives us a set of leavers that we can pull as we tried to make jobs more motivating. When we look at the rows and we look at people stay may be not so motivated by this job, what are some of the things that we can do that can increase their motivation, make this a more rewarding job that people want to do better? Again, let's start from the bottom. Mistake [inaudible] skill variety. Do people feel they have a variety of skills in their job? Now, if you remember back to your intro economics class. If you ever took an intro economics class, there's this famous story about Adam Smith writing about the pin factory and how once people really started to specialize in particular operations, people could make a lot more pins. This idea of specialization makes us more productive. Let's have everybody just do one task, can make them productive, but it can make them really bored and disengaged as well. Skill variety is just well enough specialization to make people effective, but sometimes you want to let people do a variety of things if we want to keep them engaged. There are a couple of strategies cover. One is job enrichment. Let's add a few things to people's jobs. Say you're stacking shelves, that can potentially get repetitive after a while, how can we add to that? Well, maybe your job is stacking shelves, but I also expect you to answer customer inquiries. Really a lot of what you're doing is also helping direct customers answer their questions about the products and all those things. Now it's not just about shelf stacking, it's also customer engagement. How have you mixed your job? There's more to it. You'll be a little less effective at stacking shelves. You keep getting distracted, but it does give you more things to do and ability to practice more skills, hopefully more engaging. Another strategy is job rotation. Say Trader Joe's, on any given shift, you're not just going to be working the cash register all day, nor are you just going to be stacking shelf. Everybody during the shift they will rotate around different tasks. The cash registers, you'll stack shelves, you'll clean the store, those things, making sure nobody gets burnt out in any one job and people get to see a variety of different things. Building skill variety, I think is something that's very valuable. A second lever that maybe we want to pull is task significance. If we want to make people's jobs more motivating, we can think about how do we make them feel they are more worthwhile. Stacking shelves and not feeding the world right? Well, maybe I'm doing both. My colleague, Andrew Cotton has very nice study where he looks at NASA during the space race and he talks about a janitor who was asked what he's doing, he said, "Well, I'm putting a man on the moon." People looked and when you're cleaning a floor, well, he's cleaning a floor, but he's also helping put a man on the moon because ultimately maintaining the facilities where everything happen does is crucial to the enterprises anything else that anybody is doing. How people frame their jobs, the extent to which they perceive them as just putting things on shelves versus making the lives of people better is important. In any job there is this potential, if we think about grocery stores, are they important? Well, they are feeding people. We can think about them potentially as enriching people's lives by enabling them to experience new kinds of food, healthier kinds of foods and goods, those things. Think about a clothing store. A clothing store, it's helping me feel happy and more confident in who I'm by getting better clothes, which you may feel is important. Think about a book store, they're selling knowledge. In all of these cases, stores really are helping people. Everybody who's working in that store is making people's lives better. Question is, how do we ensure that they feel that way? I think the culture of the organization, the extent to which it seems to have a purpose, and the extent to which it's really able to transmit the value of that purpose to other people and to the people who work in it. They feel they're part of a collective endeavor that is making a difference, is very important. You look at various different brands and you see the different ways that achieve this. Lunar Lamina, a company I've talked about before with the fully priced yoga pants. They're are fitness brand and so they really emphasize through that everything that they do both to their employees and their customers, the idea of fitness of living a healthy life, all of those things by making their people brand ambassadors, both inside their work. But beyond that, they really helped to bring them in and help them feel they're making a difference in that way potentially. If you think about Trader Joe's, we've talked about how aims to sell low-price products, but high-quality. We've talked about their on-boarding, they spend 10 days really imbibing the culture, helping people to understand what they should see as the importance of what they do. Talking about delivering a wow customer service. Another store that emphasizes meaning is Wegmans. I don't think I've talked about Wegmans. Wegmans is a grocery store actually, again in my local area, Northeast of the United States, finally around, but with many branches it buys with Trader Joe's for having the highest customer satisfaction among grocery stores, it also was rated as the second base place to work in the entire United States in a recent survey. So does a very good job of engaging its employees and producing value, how does it do it? It's interesting to look at their company philosophy. They really emphasize the value of their people. We believe that good people working towards a common goal can accomplish anything they set out to do and they really talk about their purpose in this spirit, we set our goal to be the very best that serving the needs of our customers, every action we take should be made with this in mind. They also believe we can achieve this goal if we fulfill the needs of our own people. So they are really expressing to the people, what are we doing? Why do we come to work every day? We'd do it to make our customers lives better to serve their needs. I think if you can really get people to buy into that philosophy, you give them a sense of purpose in what they're doing. You give them a sense of the significance of that work and that can make the role motivating. Another dimension that we can look at and improving jobs as feedback, people want to see what the result of my work? How am I improvement people's lives? This can be quite high for people who are in direct customer service roles, they see how they are helping people the further back from the customer service roles, maybe potentially challenging. Questions are, I mentioned shelf-stackers the more they're helping customers. Skill variety potentially also, it's helping them get a stronger sense as well of how they're helping people. Finding ways to build that feedback, finding ways to help people really see what they're achieving is valuable. One way Wegmans does this across roles, is enabling people to get instant feedback to those who've helped them. If one of my colleagues have done a good job in helping them, they can give me a voucher, five dollars I think, for food in the store. Not a huge amount, but enough to say we appreciate you and giving people feedback that yes, "You're doing a good job, people are noticing it." The final piece then is autonomy, and this kind of brings us back. So way back in Module 1, I talked a lot about autonomy. I talked about it in terms of opportunities to contribute. This idea that those organizations that create the most value from their workforce are the ones that really give them more discretion. They seek their ideas more, they give them more opportunities to contribute to the organization and therefore really make more use of their skills and motivation. Giving people discretion is valuable for getting the work done, it turns out it's highly motivating as well. As a one of the things that we see is in those organizations where people are most excited to go to work, tends to be those where they're most empowered. Again, I mentioned Wegmans a minute, it goes second best place to work in the United States. They give their people a lot of autonomy, lot of discretion. So managers really get to run the departments as they like. Interestingly, Wegmans even celebrates those people who may break rules, they tell a story about a customer who was going to miss a family reunion and wanted to order a cake for the reunion. In order to do so, the person who was selling the cake had to take a credit card order over the phone. Apparently, this is against the rules of Wegman, you're not supposed to take credit card orders over the phone but she did so anyway, in order to help out this customer who couldn't order the cake in any other way, they break the rules. But Wegmans, that was seen as a good thing because in this case she was doing it for good reason, she was trying to help this customer. Really, it's an organization that prides autonomy and because of that, has a workforce is willing to use that autonomy in constructive ways to help make sure the work gets done in a way that benefits customers and that benefits the organization. When we look at all of these pieces as a whole, and we see that how work is structured is a huge part of how people experience it and how motivated they are. There are obviously tradeoffs here. When we talk about the variety, the rotations on, there are trade-offs between how engaged people are in that productivity that we might get from specialization. Similarly with autonomy, there are trade offs. Do we want people to follow the right processes? Do we want to give them discretion? But what we see across these organizations is trying to find that right balance and really trying to do it in ways that engage the workforce and make sure that they feel that they are contributing to the endeavor. Therefore really want to come to work every day and put in their best efforts to serve the customer and make the organization more successful.
