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.
