about motivation.
We had the discussion about intellectual stimulation, the comments on Live Otherwise about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and quite recently at work I went on a training course where I was delighted to discover something about my employers that actually very few employers could claim as an honest truth. They genuinely do value their staff as individuals. Also recent struggles with childcare (which now seem to be resolved, although not holding my breath 😉 ) have got me to thinking about just why I would be upset if I had to stop working again and it’s not just for the few extra quid a week it’s bringing in, or the time away from the children.
Thinking about the various jobs I’ve had (and there have been many) and which I enjoyed most I can see the common thread running through is that the ones I enjoyed the most were not the best paid ones and certainly not the ones where I was ‘just a number’. I’ve just read a really interesting couple of articles as linked to by Bob on Live Otherwise and found myself nodding in approval. My parents have both run their own businesses all my life and I have had many positions with managerial responsibilities where motivating people to do their job and do it well was a daily consideration – the most challenging being having a team of 40 people to keep happy, working and in the job so I didn’t have to go through the time consuming and expensive to the company round of recruitment and training to replace lost employees.
I didn’t like the job I had working as a checkout operator – I felt patronised, both by my employer and the customers. There is a real attitude towards people working in the service industry that I loathe. It seems to be something that doesn’t exist in other countries so much, certainly in America people seem to consider waiting, bar staff etc to be a career with their customers as their audience and their wages doubled and tripled by tips if they perform well, but more than that they actually seem to enjoy and want to do it well. Here we don’t expect, and don’t respond so well if we get, that level of service. I distinctly recall sitting on my checkout and having people bring 3 rolls of wallpaper to me and saying ‘there’s three of those’ as though because I was wearing stupid checked dungarees and a Happy To Help badge I must have certainly has some sort of lobotomy before starting work that afternoon. (My stock response to this was always ‘well I just need to check that, bear with me – one……two…….three. Ok’ which of course meant I was as guilty of offering bad service back really’. Somehow standing behind a desk in a library doesn’t bring out quite such prejudice as selling DIY goods in the public, although you still find yourself the target of someone having a bad day generally :roll:). But I also felt patronised by my employers – the ‘Employee of the month’, the ‘£10 on the spot bonus reward if you were spotted giving ‘good service’, the annual appraisals where you only ever scored 3 or 4 out of 5 for everything – if you were scoring 1 or 2 then you’d have been hauled up long before your appraisal and if you were getting 5s then you’d have been promoted by now, this was fast track retail where there were constant vacancies for people happy to work 60 hours a week for the giddy reward of a job title with ‘Supervisor’ or ‘Manager’ in it and an extra 50 pence an hour (of course that was only for the hours you were paid for – not the 20 odd a week you put in just to keep your job, meaning you actually were paid less than the people below you per hour!). Having worked for a similarly operated big multiple company a few years later albeit in a higher up position (pretty much the one I just described actually with 10 hour days as absolutely standard – at interview I was told hours were 8am to 6pm normally let alone at Christmas and other mad busy periods) I loathed it just as much, felt just as patronised, just as trapped, just as hoodwinked into thinking that the salary and job title justified the hours, the stress and the general all round crap – and that it was all actually a pointless and meaningless too.
I worked in sales but as anyone in sales will tell you you can only sell products or services you believe in. This is mostly because that is the only way you will have a convincing sales pitch but I actually think it is also because otherwise you become utterly disillusioned. Even the most dynamic, bullshit ridden estate agent can’t possibly get as much job satisfaction from confusing someone into thinking a property is their overpriced dream home when it quite clearly isn’t – surely the skill comes from identifying someone’s needs, budget and then matching it as precisely as possible to the houses on the market. When I worked in recruitment the greatest joy was matching the perfect candidate to the perfect job, knowing that they were going to be going to work every day at a job they loved and their boss would be getting a productive employee.
Easily my most satisfying job was the one where I was most valued. The one where I regular dialogue and feedback from my boss, where I felt guided with my potential recognised and my talents and skills developed and used. Where being me was why they employed me, not because I was another body who would put in the hours. In that job I built a team, a dynamic, happy, motivated team. I did it by giving staff the hours they wanted to work and recruiting to fill in the gaps rather than making people work hours that didn’t really suit them. I offered praise certainly, but more importantly I identified what tasks people did well at, excelled at, enjoyed doing and gave them more of them to do. I had staff who were organisational freaks, who loved tidying and making things orderly – they were tasked with doing more of that, I had staff who were creative and artisitic so they were tasked with displays and visual projects. The employer / employee relationship is two way exploitation – or to give it a friendlier term, partnership. Without a good team of workers the boss wouldn’t be making any money, would have no business. Without an employer the workers likely couldn’t exercise their money making talent alone, without every part of the team the others would be adrift, the chain would break down, you can’t be great without the people supporting you. I learnt a valuable lesson when I left that job – I was lured away by more money and the promise of career advancement, having felt in my ingrained retail terms that I’d done all there was to do in that role. I learnt that what I’d been good at was not actually retail management – when it came down to it there were massive chunks of retail management that I totally sucked at, my skills had been in working with those individuals, learning about them, what made them tick, what made them happy and motivated and then giving them lots of it to do, in recognising their potential – I employed a previously unemployed for 6 years woman and left there with her as the Assistant Manager – she could probably have even taken over my job if I’d had another year or so with her boosting her confidence and showing her what she really was capable of. All of us there used to actively enjoy coming to work, being part of that team and working in a happy, friendly, coopertative environment.
Motivational techniques, and yes even money do work to an extent, of course they do. For some people they work forever, for life. For others they simply don’t work at all and for the majority they work like sugar – a small and artifical high which slumps just as quickly as it has us up and leaves us feeling deflated, cheated and conned into thinking we wanted something that actually we weren’t really that bothered about. Think about what brings you real joy? Is it falling in love and realising that person loves you too or is it a lottery win? Is it a brand new car or a brand new baby? I’m forever telling my children that something worth doing can be hard to achieve. Scarlett loves her jigsaw puzzles at the moment – she gets far more out of completing them all by herself and seeing it finished than she would from winning a sticker for tidying them away again. If you ran a sponsored marathon would it be completing it or the amount of money you raised that gave you greatest satisfaction?
I want my children to identify what makes them happy and gives them a genuine sense of fulfilment and then work out how to make that what they spend their days doing as adults rather than go through life gathering badges and rewards for having done stuff they didn’t really want to do. Which is not to say that life isn’t about cause and effect and bartering our skills and abilities for goods and services because of course it is. Almost all the rewards in parenting are intrinsic, there is little praise, financial incentive or obvious congratulations but I’d consider it one of the most worthwhile, rewarding and meaningful tasks I’ve ever done.
enjoyed reading this. Having a big crisis with work at the moment (obv James’s work!) so feel a lot is relevant to us. I want him to get a job where he enjoys going, it doesn’t have to be a “successful” job just something he enjoys. I think you make good points about what actually helps make something a good job and makes you want to work more.
Funny how you’ve been pondering on something that I have today even though it’s been sparked from completely different things.
Comment by Kirsty — 07 March 2007 @ 3:45 pm
Don’t see that you can compare doing a jigsaw with getting a sticker for putting it away again! Shouldn’t you be comparing whether she’d be happier tidying up afterwards with or without a sticker? Or whether getting a sticker added to her puzzle-solving enjoyment (maybe she could stick it on the wall and each one would remind her of all the great times she’d had doing puzzles)?
And as for the marathon – I think I’d be massively proud of myself, but also massively proud of all the money I’d raised for charity – I don’t know which would be greater, but I can’t imagine it’d be so clearly one or the other.
I just don’t think it’s one or the other. I think most people probably do best on a combination of the two.
Comment by Alison — 07 March 2007 @ 9:30 pm
Bad examples both of them – I realised it on re-reading but was doing something else while writing it.
My argument would be that if we are equally as motivated by extrinsic rewards as intrinsic ones then that is a result of the conditioning we have recieved perhaps?
But the people who I envy, the one’s who I think have got it just right are the ones who manage to make their living and get their financial rewards by doing something they’d actually do for free because that’s how much they love it. And if at all possible to help the kids identify what it is that motivates them from inside without getting bogged down in doing things for extrinsic rewards then that is my aim.
Comment by Nic — 07 March 2007 @ 10:01 pm
How many people is that then, about 1 in a million? Nice fairy tale ending.
I don’t think parenting is its own reward either, otherwise I’d feel just as great at the end of a shitty day as I do at the end of a good one.
Extrinsic rewards cover a lot more than just money. I don’t live in a bubble, and I’m not the only person whose opinions matter to me. And I don’t envy anyone 🙂
Comment by Alison — 07 March 2007 @ 10:52 pm
“My argument would be that if we are equally as motivated by extrinsic rewards as intrinsic ones then that is a result of the conditioning we have recieved perhaps?”
Why can’t it be as a result of the simple fact that extrinsic rewards are useful and/or nice things? People like to be appreciated, they like to have money, they like to be given presents, they like all the positive strokes that make the world a more pleasant place.
A world full of people only doing things because they want to, because it’s fulfiling for them, doesn’t seem like a great place to live actually.
Comment by Alison — 07 March 2007 @ 11:01 pm
A quick search of your blog for the word ‘bribe’ would suggest you value extrinsic awards as much as the rest of us 😉
Comment by Chris (Portico) — 08 March 2007 @ 9:25 am
😆 busted! But my philosophy is there even if I fall short of it!
Comment by Nic — 08 March 2007 @ 12:38 pm
Oh I got here late – I enjoy my work – if I didn’t need to do it, I would still do it in some form, albeit more on the ‘whatever documents I choose to translate’ side. I would never go back to work that suited me less well than this and I’m pretty sure it’s a lot more than one in a million who get a great deal of satisfaction out of their work.
Extrinsic rewards are great for what they can do but it’s the intrinsic satisfaction that stays with you and makes life more than just an existence with treats.
Comment by Ali — 08 March 2007 @ 3:49 pm
I think that Ali has it – spot on. What really makes life complete is inrtinsic satisfaction. I think that is why people who manage to attain an existence packed with money and ‘success’ often find it a complete let down. The rewards won’t make you happy if the life you are living does not.
I think the world has gone ‘reward’ loopy. You can’t attend the most minor of course or training session without coming out with a certificate. Similarly, even the most obvious and tedious of work books often come with sheets and sheets of gold stars. I suspect it is an attempt at distraction from lack of real content or purpose.
Comment by Allie — 08 March 2007 @ 6:08 pm