Meaning and Motivation in the Workplace
By: Dale Hopkins
Tags: Motivation, Metrics

Saskatoon: the Beautiful

Are you confident that your organization firmly connects each employee with customer objectives in a way that maximizes their engagement and productivity?

For simplicity, you can think of work as accounting for approximately one-third of your time with sleep being another third and the remaining third dedicated to everything else. Most of us seek to find meaning and purpose in our lives and quickly rule out sleep as the answer to accomplishing either. It quickly becomes obvious that work must play a role in fulfilling the need for significance, which we see reflected in the language of “life’s work.” This phrase is often used to refer to a person’s purpose or calling, though the term generally refers to the grand sum of the work one accomplishes during their lifetime. I propose that, with effort, an organization can use customer-centric goals to surface the meaning and purpose inherent in the work for employees.

A Personal Story

When I started at Vendasta in 2010, we were a small startup with about 20 employees organized into 3 software teams. We had aspirations of being a product company but, at the time, we did a significant amount of contract software development to “extend the runway,” as the saying goes. The team I was hired onto worked with a large organization called the Ritchie Brothers Auctioneers, or RBA for short. We were hired to assist them with equipment intake at auction sites to accurately capture all relevant information about the equipment as it entered the lot. This allowed remote estimation specialists to determine the value of the equipment for the seller, in turn providing this data to the website to inform remote bidders. In my role, I would regularly fly to Vancouver to work in the RBA head office to work closely with them and interface with their QA team and Project managers. We also attended live auctions to better understand how our software was used and how auctions worked.

Looking back on this experience, I find it interesting how intrinsically motivated I was. We were doing contract software development, a frustrating process with its myriad of documents and contract negotiations. Still, in the midst of arguing over “implicit requirements” and the cost of various change orders, our whole team was excited to see the results of each release of the new software. We took time one Friday to read the RBA shareholder report that mentioned the software we had built was pivotal in their ability to increase margins by something like 200 basis points!

Motivation and its Relationship to Meaning

Last year, I came across the work of Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor, whose book Primed to Perform dives into the mechanics of human motivation. The core tenet of the book is that there are six factors that motivate all human behaviour. Three of these factors are referred to as positive and simultaneously build a person’s bond with their group; the other three factors are referred to as negative and erode the bond with that person’s group. Armed with this information, Doshi and McGregor prescribe companies a more diligent approach to increasing positive motivators and decreasing or even eliminating negative motivators.

The first and strongest of these motivators is play and reflects the fact that it’s pretty easy to motivate people to do things that are inherently enjoyable. As managers, we can consider the interests of people — which vary greatly — and optimize project and task assignments to allow people to spend more of their time doing work they like doing.

The next motivator is purpose, which speaks to the fact that people like to do work they find meaningful. Sure, it’s not as strong of a motivator as play, but why not? It comes down to “temporal coupling”: there is a larger temporal gap between when the work is performed and when the rewards are reaped. With play, on the other hand, the work itself is the reward, so no temporal gap exists. In the workplace and particularly in R&D, there is a notable gap between doing the work and then seeing it realize its purpose. This is one of the most likely areas for improvement as a manager; we need to make sure our engineers are connected with the customer so they can see the purpose of their work regularly and with a conscious effort so as to minimize latency.

The last motivator is potential and it is the weakest of the three motivators. It applies when the person does not necessarily enjoy their work (play) and they don’t necessarily see the positive impact of their work (purpose) but they do see how it builds their future capacity or potential. This is something that R&D managers understand and strive to do though training and growth opportunities to our engineers.

Getting back to the purpose motivator, if we dig a bit deeper, we see that a sense of purpose is grounded in human psychology and leverages our natural inclination towards curiosity. Humans in general are driven towards learning new things as doing so helps us discover our purpose as well as our limitations through mastery. This is an important point as the actual sense of purpose felt from an achievement is oftentimes linked to its difficulty rather than the significance of the achievement. Games are a prime example of this principle at work: there is no productive purpose to a game, only the satisfaction of mastering a skill and testing one’s mettle.

Add Context to Goals for Alignment and Motivation

As managers and leaders, we have a powerful tool for both motivation and alignment that too often goes unrecognized: context. So often we try to save time and tell our teams the solution that our customers need rather than sharing the full context of the problem and the trail of thinking that lead us to the proposed solution.

Context is key as it can be leveraged by the team to discover optimizations or select trade-offs more appropriately. This is the core message in Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People that so often gets misinterpreted as “convince them it was their idea.” There is more to context than simply empowering the team to make optimizations and trade-offs (i.e. autonomous decisions). More importantly, this information helps the team understand the meaning and purpose of the work they are doing; it elucidates who the customer is and why this is important to that customer.

From speaking with other managers and leaders, most of us think we do this but I’ve found that we rarely do so effectively. Not only do you need to communicate context, you need to do it frequently and you need to make it discoverable. This usually means explicitly writing it down, which can be challenging for many people. It also means collaborating with people on the written document and making sure that it is complete. Most of us fail to capture the full context in our writing because we aren’t aware of the limits of “common knowledge” or what is or isn’t “obvious.” Reviewing your written documentation with your teams can help ensure these types of gaps do not hamper effectiveness. This type of writing also dovetails nicely with good metrics (i.e. OKRs).

It’s a good word but “cadence” always makes me think bicycles. Winter biking is the best.

Developing a Regular Review Cadence

Now that you understand the power of purpose and motivation in tandem with the value of written context, there is only one part left: cadence of review. When you regularly review the progress of your team(s) and share the impact of that progress on the business and customers, you have taken a major step towards the increased motivation of your team.

“Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.” - Atomic Habits by James Clear

Review is an opportunity to change or double down on current strategies based on the results being achieved. This cadence should be regular and, as such, it makes a lot of sense to align this with the cadence of the sprint. The sprint review is a perfect opportunity for reviewing metrics in addition to the software that was shipped.

Agile methodologies have always leveraged a strong cadence punctuated with rituals in the name of the values like regular customer collaboration and shipment of working software, as espoused in The Agile Manifesto. I generally feel humbled when, after reading new material and doing some critical thinking, I come to the conclusion that there is even more depth to The Agile Manifesto than I realized and I’m able to further appreciate its truly insightful nature.

I understand now why the contract software work with the Ritchie Brothers was such an exciting time in my career: I had context and a clear understanding of my team’s goals, I understood my contribution to those goals, and I had wide autonomy over my approach to attaining those goals.