How can organisations tempt employees into engaging more fully in work and retain their interest, energy and willingness to work for them with enthusiasm on a day-to-day basis? Engaging emotional, as well as rational. Commitment is the key to maintaining motivation, says Ann Gammie
Imagine the following scenario: A management team running a processing operation are working hard to turn around the performance of a unit against some seriously disabling ‘baggage’ – low morale, limited capability and mediocre performance. During this intensive change period, both Director-level pressure and technological change are putting them in the spotlight. Their dedication and energy is focused on making a difference. Three months later, their hard work pays off. They celebrate a whole quarter of performance improvement. They are euphoric! Another month goes by. This one included public holidays where a significant number of people are permitted to take annual leave. In good motivational spirit the team leader asked staff to take responsibility for ensuring that work levels would not slip. But they do – and badly. Their motivation now is at rock bottom. They are devastated.
The big question here is whether it was a blip along an otherwise improving situation, or whether their earlier euphoria had been premature? Scenarios like this are played out in millions of places every day. Just when you think everything is running smoothly, there’s a dip in performance for no apparent reason. The challenge for many senior managers, who find themselves in such a situation, is how to generate the energy and enthusiasm to continue meeting the challenges? If the organisation has addressed the mainstream motivational issues, such as decent HR practices and policies, a safe environment, a morally sound ethos, then how on a day-to-day basis do they keep people motivated? In other words, how can organisations retain people’s interest, energy and willingness to work for them with enthusiasm?
It used to be simple
These days, the things that keep people at work are a long way from the traditional expectations of job-for-life and even a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. The traditional psychological contract is now challenged in so many ways. Being valued for loyalty is much less relevant as more people want to be valued for who they are and what they bring, not just for doing what is requested of them. They want some control over their lives, to have a voice, to make choices in return for being flexible and for learning to adapt quickly to the next wave of change. Given these challenges, maintaining motivation is much more complex.
Motivation in reality
An organisation’s culture and work ethic will certainly influence motivation. But how does one lift people from a culture in which they generally do as little as they can, have no sense of responsibility about doing a good job and are relaxed about standards and deadlines? If the organisation already has a strong ‘work ethic’ and accountability is accepted as part of the deal, then motivation is enabled by this more vibrant culture. So message one is that we need to be clear about the current status of being at work. Secondly, there are jobs in which the purpose of employment for the individual is to earn enough to live a reasonably good life. In this case (if we define optimum motivation in the workplace as someone offering their discretionary effort) then, the judicious application of base pay, benefits and bonuses can work wonders, as long as you can afford it.
However, when people work because they not only need to live but also because there is something rewarding in the work itself, then the pay and benefits approach in most cases won’t work.
Take the following scenarios:
Case 1 – High remuneration is my goal
“If I want to be remunerated well, I won’t tolerate so much complexity that it impairs my ability to gain financially.” So, the more we utilise the reward strategy as our main mechanism for eliciting extra effort, the more we have to simplify and codify the links between action, output and reward. So, what might the reasons be for someone in this environment showing signs of poor motivation? Stretch targets may be set too high, making it impossible to achieve. Or the environment within which work takes place undermines employees’ efforts – i.e. open-plan offices where high noise levels make sensitive calls difficult.
Case 2 – High stimulation is my goal
“If I want a job that interests me, I will tolerate greater complexity because I enjoy making sense of it, assuming I have some freedom to act. So, providing me with stretch and responsibility is what will engage me to offer all I’ve got.” As we are hearing at present there are limitations to how far this can be continued when career opportunities are becoming scarcer. What might the reasons be for someone in this challenging environment showing signs of poor motivation? Their efforts and results may not be valued or recognised by others, or, they themselves may be unimpressed with their own progress. The work may be devalued by concurrent or subsequent events. Or perhaps they are not trusted with certain information, and so on.
So, how do we engender the will and energy to revive effort and output in both of these cases? In any organisation, both these sorts of worker communities (motivated by money or by stimulation) might exist and the line management approach will need to vary depending on needs.
What works?
In both cases we need to appeal to individuals’ needs. The potential reasons for loss of motivation can be described as unfulfilled ‘performance needs’ (Kano1) or expectations not being met. That sense of “this usually works” or “this usually delivers the required result” being thwarted affects our rational and emotional commitment (Stairs2). This is what happened to the team in the scenario at the beginning of this article.
Both the rational and emotional commitment of that team were damaged. They put in the hours, got their troops on board and earned the respect of their peers. Yet, the work style that worked in the first quarter, failed in the second one. The subsequent dip in performance hit them personally and emotionally, as well as in performance terms.
They couldn’t understand what went wrong. “Was it just the Hawthorne effect or did we get it wrong?” (rational commitment) they pondered. Having initially believed they made a big difference, they then began doubting themselves. “Maybe things are stacked against us; we’re not as smart as we thought; maybe we’re not so good at this job after all” (emotional commitment).
This double-whammy is what made the impact so devastating for the team. Had it just been a more objective analysis of the situation, which was positioned as a trial run with the possibility of failure being accepted by all, then the impact would not have been felt so much. If we understand what motivates individuals and know more about emotional commitment, then we are more likely to take appropriate action to position possible failure (accepting it as a learning process). Pre-empting the emotional consequences of a potential setback in this way will help to not only regain engagement, but also lighten spirits and motivate them.
Motivation depends on emotional commitment
This team scenario illustrates how the rational approach is not sufficient, and why managers need to consider how to engage emotional commitment. That means taking people through a process, which can determine what is important for them in such a situation and appealing to it.
In the following boxed section is ER Consultants’ Commitment Ladder, the route along which we take people to gradually gain their commitment. In our experience, to gain this commitment, we need to take people through various ‘gates’, enabling them to become committed. It is a management approach about dialogue, joint exploration, challenge and debate. In our view, this is a major issue facing many organisations, both in the public and private sector. If you have comments, challenges or queries, then contact me: ann.gammie@erconsultants.co.uk.
References :
1. Kano, N. Seraku, Takashi, F. and Tsuji, s. (1984) Attractive Quality and Must-be Quality
2. Martin Stairs. (2005) Work Happy: Developing employee engagement to deliver competitive advantage, Selection & Development Review, Vol 21, No 5.
ER Consultants’ Commitment Ladder
ER Consultants uses a ‘ladder’ of commitment building steps to help bring people to the table. It starts from creating awareness, checking that knowledge does exist through to the point at which the past can be left behind and people are turning towards the future.
From our experience, the stages to engagement are simple in concept but arduous to apply, with often considerable time lags before an impact is felt. This is a sequential ladder, where each step needs to be climbed before the next is enabled.
Achieving commitment requires us to act and check our impact every step of the way:
- What are employees hearing? What do they think is going on? What feedback or evidence are they working on? What history and recurring stories guide their thinking? How much do we need them to know about things like new clients, space re-allocation, etc?
- What do they understand by that information? What is the sense that people make of what they see or hear? How accurately have these messages been translated? How can we develop more of a shared and common understanding?
- Now that people understand what is going on, we need to support them through the required change in what they do, where they are, helping them find a new path or tack by which they can be successful.
- Motivating people to do more requires them to accept that there is something to be done which they can do, that they are capable of doing and triggers what is important for them.
- Only now can we expect them to let go of where they were and offer their commitment. This is the specific requirements we have of them, whether given as direction or elicited from them.
This process is what we term ‘commitment gates’, which feature strongly in our change leadership projects. These are the backbone of creating operational effectiveness relatively quickly. ER Consultants recently worked closely with the Head of Training and Development of a European organisation, to do exactly that. The organisation wanted to introduce a single systems platform across their European units quickly and effectively. We helped them to plan the implementation process, identify how to equip staff with the skills to manage change, to measure change readiness and resilience. Together we developed a programme to actively engage people and gain their emotional commitment in the new ethos, helping to change not only employee behaviour, but also people’s fundamental understanding of the business. The result – a 16% rise in employee satisfaction pre-change to post-change.
