Motivation is often most vulnerable during times of change. Anne Bennett explores how a dynamic and harmonious approach to job design can produce a more motivated workforce
If you were to ask your employees why they came in to work today, what would they say? Is it likely that many would respond by saying: “I like the way my job fits around me. I like how it is designed to suit both me and what I’ve been asked to do, and I can change my approach when the business goalposts move?” If not, we know there is still work to do to deliver a motivated workforce.

A ‘dynamic and harmonious’ approach to job design is often the missing link to motivation. Amidst all the technical considerations of re-designing an organisation and changing work practices, managers need to pay attention to the design and evolution of jobs. Jobs must have the potential to satisfy and stretch people. People must be allowed scope to innovate in the business and to fill in those pieces of the change plan that only emerge when we are getting on with it. That’s where ER Consultants can help. When we coach leaders or support clients’ change initiatives, we frequently deploy some essential reminders about the way people tick and why it matters in business. In many of our assignments, we are increasingly finding that our clients are trying to make the pieces of individual motivation and major business change management come together. But there’s still nervousness about linking systematic work design with individual idiosyncratic motivation in today’s business world. However, our experience with several clients proves that business goals can sit alongside personal goals to create a win-win situation for both parties.

Filling the motivation gap

Let’s set out the gap that job design can fill for a business. From the individual motivation perspective, we can guide people into their private space, through questions such as: “Do you know what motivates you?” Of course, the answers will always be contingent. That is, no one is 100% motivated by money or doing-good, power, recognition, perks or friendly work mates every year of their working life.  We all change. We all have our own responses to changing circumstances. Some individuals have not asked themselves these questions. Others make assumptions based on how they identify themselves or others.

Looking at motivation from the business perspective, the aim of these discussions is to encourage a new habit in the thinking and feeling processes of the organisation – that of being curious and staying in touch with questions about motivation. The golden new rule is to not make assumptions about what motivates. It’s about keeping up a regular dialogue about it and using the evidence and responses as core management information to guide organizational learning to fulfil human and business potentials. We use tools such as ‘Process Perception Analysis’ by which a whole range of assumptions can be tested with groups, across boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us’; how we think they see us and how they assume we see them. This saves time and angst, as well as confounding frequently negative assumptions.

Motivational factors
From organisational theory, HR and other managers learn that a systematic approach to creating a motivating workplace (such as that offered by Robertson and Smith¹) would include:

1. People have a realistic understanding of the links between effort and performance, i.e. they know how hard they need to work to reach various levels of performance.
2. People have the competence and confidence to translate efforts into performance.
3. Control systems are introduced only when necessary.
4. Performance requirements are expressed in terms of hard but attainable, specific goals.
5. People participate in setting goals.
6. Feedback is regular, informative and easy to interpret.
7. People are praised for good performance.
8. Rewards (including pay) are seen as equitable.
9. Rewards are tailored to individual requirements and preferences.
10. People’s psychological and physical well-being is recognised as important.
11. Productivity is recognised as important.
12. Jobs are designed, where possible, to maximise:
    1. Skills variety;
    2. Task identity;
    3. Task significance;
    4. Autonomy;
    5. Feedback;
    6. Opportunities for learning and growth.
13. Organisation and job changes are brought about through consultation and discussion, not by fiat.

What goes awry?
In a typical change process, some of these motivating factors are at odds with each other. For example, control systems have their own rationale, which can pre-empt consideration of the benefits of giving individuals scope to be flexible and to innovate. Their expertise in understanding how a system is working and how it can be made to work better is restricted. Progressive approaches to managing pay, performance and communications deliver on affordability, fairness and equity, business needs and alignment. However, they may overlook the scope to be more productive. So systems need to work along with relationships and personal involvement by all parties.

At a corporate level, job design is often inexact. The sense of what can be achieved by the unit/individual becomes fixed at a too-low or unsustainably high level, either of which causes stress and underperformance.  In terms of motivation, individuals disengage (or are excluded) from influencing any variance, and discretionary effort is lost.

 Job design – making the traditional ‘basics’ dynamic and harmonious
Change in organisations can make it hard to customise jobs to individuals. The requirements are often fluid; like chess pieces constantly moving around. However, the six components of job design referred to in point 12 opposite are best seen as a total package to be achieved in a way that fits today’s business context. It is as important as ever to bring coherence to each job, where it fits in the bigger picture of the organisation. In other words, what is the jobholder striving to achieve? How will they know they are on the right track? How will they be recognized for their expertise? Just because job specifications are often out of date the day they are written, these requirements should not be left hanging.

One powerful method for making this ‘job coherence’ accessible to individuals, colleagues and change leaders is to use a closely-specified process of ‘storytelling’ especially adapted for the purpose of surfacing a rich and realistic profile of the job. We have used this method with our clients to help formulate new roles – using a narrative based on corporate strategy (see case study opposite). This meaningful product can be actively used to maintain motivation through uncertainty. For example, we are frequently working in this way with project start-up teams – particularly for the public sector – following re-structuring, or to implement policy, legislation and new services. The process generates meaningful information, insights and ideas to drive change, and has currency for each individual as they relate their own experience and needs into the story.

ER Consultants’ approach helps organisations assess the relative risks of control versus empowerment and look at the readiness and potential in the culture and workforce to take advantage of the dividends of discretionary effort. Building capacity and new behaviours/habits to support the ‘narrative’ of change can help bring customised jobs into the realms of possibility during mass upheavals.

Job design the key to well-being at work
HR and organisational development functions are currently adopting ‘sustainability’ as an important new focus, encompassing not only the ‘green’ agenda but also the employer’s and employee’s joint responsibilities to achieve a sustainable way of life at work. From this angle has come a renewed interest in how to create jobs (or more accurately a workplace lifestyle) that might lead to a better ‘quality of working life’. This naturally stems from greater awareness of the human and business costs of stress, health and safety risks, the puzzle of productivity in the UK and the impact of our long hours culture on individuals and wider society.

The tactics for changing organisational culture include control of core hours and shifts, and the good example expected of bosses who might role model how to go home early. As change consultants, we often see other components of culture – such as what is keeping people in their patterns of work, or ‘present in body only’ – routinely overlooked or discounted, perhaps because they seem somewhat inaccessible. How is one to ‘engineer’ this behavioural change in industries that are driven by sophisticated technology (i.e. call centres), or premium knowledge workers (i.e. NHS services), or fast-moving customer services (i.e. high-street retailers)?

The challenge: managing the personal change experience to achieve the corporate goal
These days we accept and appreciate that each individual psychological make-up is unique and fluid.  We know that some will thrive in one environment and not in another. Recruitment should not be the only time at which we try to match individual and job, and fix the psychological contract. Small variances in the workplace will benefit some and hurt others.

The basic sense of these statements is something that organisations struggle with – these truths imply diversity, not uniformity, and many systems find that a strain. However essential the ‘new order’ being imposed by corporate decisions or external forces, the personal responses will differ. These should be closely observed and mined for what they can tell us. This requires personal engagement from managers. ER Consultants is often in the role of ensuring that these activities are incorporated in the change process and reflected in emergent job design. Hence, we make this plea: re-invest in the art, as well the science, of job design.

Reference :

1. Ivan T Robertson & Mike Smith, Motivation and Job Design (1985)

Case Study:
Co-creating Future Roles

Ahead of radical changes in legislation, statutory powers and parliamentary structures, a small regional government office proactively considered its future role and potential new ways of working. They enlisted the help of ER Consultants to do that. From the outset there was a sense-making process, deliberately created and deployed by the ER Consultants team, to help every individual in the whole organisation take part in the design process.

 Each person has an organisational contribution to make, as well as an individual stake in creating a future for themselves. In other businesses it would be typical to see the decision-making power held at the top, and a protective stance taken to those who may no longer fit in the future organisation. In other words, the decisions about who goes and stays are filtered through a mechanistic currency of jobs, rather than including other types of ‘fitted-ness’ in the person specifications. In this case it was decided that it would be easier, quicker and more effective to start the ball rolling by co-creating stories to describe possible futures.

These stories included new ways of working together through new teams, roles and relationships, with detail about capacity, skills, know-how and soft systems that would be required. This process ran alongside inevitable imposed changes, as well as decisions dictated from external business conditions. The end result was a positive one. It produced honest and meaningful conversations, which not only successfully prepared everyone for change, but it helped individuals work out whether or not they fitted into the new organisation, if they wanted to buy-in to it or not and if so, what job they might do.