By Nash Consulting

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 For the past several decades, comprehensive surveys of employee attitudes toward work find that around 50% of American workers confess they do only the minimum to avoid being fired. Although the idea of “quiet quitting” is now in vogue, it’s not new; many people have been silently skating by for years.

As Steven Covey put it, “You can pay people for their hands and back, but they volunteer their hearts and brains.” In other words, I’ll come to work to do the bare minimum that allows me to keep my job, but if you really want me to engage fully with my work and my team, well, that’s my choice. And as we’ve discussed ad nauseum here at Nash Consulting, people make the choice to stay engaged only in an environment characterized by high morale, trust and respect, and psychological safety. This, of course, only occurs when we have skilled people-leaders.

Missing the Mark on Motivation

Engaged employees are motivated employees: motivated to fully show up, try new things, persist in the face of challenges, and embrace collaboration and commitment. Yet, we often find that even the best-intentioned managers who genuinely care about their employees can miss the mark in terms of implementing practices intended to engage and motivate their teams. In fact, research by management professor Kenneth Kovach (and replicated by others with similar results) found that there is generally a gap between what employees say they want most at work, and what their managers think they want. Here is how it stacks up: 

This is just one example of the disconnect between what drives people to engage and what managers are actually doing.  And it’s no wonder why! Management gurus and motivation researchers have long disagreed on the best ways to help employees invest maximum effort into workplace activities. However, researchers have begun to agree that nearly everyone is willing to consistently invest their heart and minds in activities that they believe will make us more successful and effective.

Your Brain on Dopamine

Dopamine, our favorite brain chemical, is responsible for motivation, and it nudges us to pursue long- and short-term goals. This all takes place amongst the galaxy of neurons and neural pathways located in our three-pound skull organ.

Dopamine (among other chemicals) is released into our brains when we anticipate a reward, which creates a desire to move in the direction of the reward our brain is craving. Put another way, dopamine is responsible for making us want to do something. Dopamine is not just about pleasure – it has the effect of narrowing our focus to the thing we believe will give us a reward (which, in turn, may bring us pleasure). This anticipation is what can inspire us to push through unpleasantries in pursuit of that reward. And, once again, one of the most powerful rewards human beings experience is the feeling that comes from success and effectiveness, which means we will likely pursue and persist in activities that we believe will improve our self-concept in these areas.
 

How Not To Destroy Motivation

So, here’s where we are: if we recognize a goal that will move us closer in the direction of success and effectiveness, our brain anticipates a reward and releases dopamine, which prompts us to move and take action toward that goal. But what can get in the way of interpreting a workplace goal as potentially reward-producing is a work environment that’s anything but rewarding. It’s hard to feel like we are on the path to increased effectiveness and success in a low-morale environment, regardless of our goals. The work environment must be engineered in a way that creates the conditions for motivation to exist.

If we’ve hired the right people, they will likely be self-motivated – meaning, many people can identify on their own what they can do in a job to enhance their success. So, the question “how do we motivate them?” is in most cases less important than the question “how do we manage in a way as not to demotivate them?”

Organizational motivation researcher Richard Clark and others have studied this question and identified several of the biggest demotivators, including the following:

The Demotivator: Enforcing unnecessary rules, policies, and work processes.
Many studies point to unnecessary rules and policies as big-time demotivators at work (for example, Dean Spitzer, 1995).  This hits us where it hurts – too many rules reduce our sense of autonomy, one of our fundamental human needs. As a manager, we should ask ourselves how much of people’s behaviors we must control to achieve our organizational or team goals. What is gained from requiring remote workers to be online at specific hours of the day if their work is fairly independent? Is there any benefit to preventing people from taking an extra 30 minutes during their lunch break to get some exercise? Do we have any evidence that dress codes add value to a business?

Suggestion for managers: Ask your employees which rules and processes they dislike the most and what changes would increase their commitment to their job or improve their work experience. Find commonalities between employees. Then, make some changes if you can, or at least advocate for your employees to the higher-ups in your organization.

The Demotivator: Behave in a way that is interpreted as dishonest or unfair.
Perception eats reality for breakfast. Leaders don’t have to be unfair or dishonest to demotivate people – they just have to be perceived as being so. Are some of your employees also your friends and are you spending more time with them at work? That could be perceived as “having favorites.” Are you holding back information that employees want to know without explaining why you can’t share it? Dishonesty alert! Do some people get to work from home and not others? Not fair (or at least that may be the perception).

Suggestion for managers: Have excellent, regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings with each of your employees. This gives you a chance to meet with everyone equally, ask what they need and how you can advocate for them, share needed information, and show a lot of care and respect for everyone. (Check out our blog post and podcast episode on how to have awesome one-on-ones.)

The Demotivator: Giving impossible performance goals.
Researchers Locke and Latham found that crazy “stretch goals” hurt motivation. Yet, it’s not uncommon for managers to set impossibly difficult goals for their employees with the mindset of if we shoot for the stars, we’ll at least land on the moon. If our B.S. sensors get the perception that the goals are unachievable or the effort to reach them outweighs the reward of achieving them, we tend to not take much action. At the same time, easy goals are also not that motivating. The research indicates that work motivation increases when we have clear, challenging, and realistic goals.

Suggestion for managers: If possible, work with your employees to collaboratively identify their goals. The more autonomy we give people in choosing their objectives, the more committed to them they will be. Then, take these goals and break them down into bite-sized chunks. Thanks to over two million brief years of human evolution, our brains are wired such that we don’t do a great job of anticipating rewards for super long-term goals. What can be done tomorrow, this month, and this quarter to stay on track with the goals?

The Demotivator: Criticizing people for mistakes and errors
We’ve met the occasional manager who thinks that they need to keep people honest by looking for opportunities to point out their mistakes. This often comes from good intentions, as they believe that constantly making employees aware of their errors will help them improve. However, several comprehensive reviews of performance feedback discovered that feedback that focused on people’s mistakes actually hurt their performance. (Check out this great Harvard Business Review article on the pitfalls of critical feedback and making the most of positive feedback.)

Suggestion for managers: It’s our job as managers to give corrective feedback when necessary. Because of this, it’s important that we build a strong relational bank account by giving more positive feedback than criticism. When someone is falling short of a goal, motivate them by giving feedback that describes what they have accomplished thus far in terms of the goal they are attempting to reach. Then discuss ways that the gap between the accomplishments and the goal can be closed. Make it a brainstorm-style conversation. When people identify their own mistakes and solutions for course correction, it’s more likely they will feel ownership for those solutions and see them through.

How to motivate your team

Ok, so we’ve taken the appropriate steps and practiced the right behaviors to avoid demotivating our employees. By doing this, we’ve successfully created a baseline for a motivated team. Now, let’s add some additional layers to this dopamine-filled cake: what’s the recipe for going beyond just a non-demotivating work environment to one that is highly motivating and where people volunteer their hearts and minds by bringing their best selves to work?

Create an emotionally positive work environment and foster mutual respect among teammates. Positive emotions such as humor, joy, and happiness enhance people’s commitment to their work and their team. No surprise there. However, it’s not necessary for everyone to be happy in order to be committed – people just need not be overly unhappy or upset about work issues. There is much to say about creating a high-morale and positive work environment, and this is one of our primary focuses as an organization. It starts with skilled and relationship-focused leadership. (Check out our blog post and podcast series on the Top 15 Management Skills.) Here are three high-level ideas for creating this type of environment:

1. Create high levels of psychological safety. This involves many things, but one of the biggest factors is having leaders who demonstrate care and respect for their employees. It’s the leader who engages their employees to understand their concerns and motives; who works to remove barriers that are preventing people from doing their best work; who treats employees as human beings with complex lives outside of work; who fosters a sense of fairness and equity; who listens really well, receives feedback non-defensively, is open to new ideas, critiques with kindness, and asks for people’s opinions. In general, these are the managers who create an environment in which team members can speak out, make mistakes, and “not know,” without fear of being “punished” emotionally. (We have a whole podcast episode on psychological safety.)
    

2. Develop skills in all team members that contribute to a positive environment. With your team, identify the behaviors that would lead to a positive and professional workplace environment – one that is characterized by psychological safety - and the behaviors that would do harm to the work environment and diminish the sense of safety and trust. This may include receiving feedback non-defensively, giving feedback with respect, finding healthy ways to deal with workplace negativity, and engaging in collaborative decision-making processes. Work with your team to develop not only a commitment to applying these behaviors, but the skills to practice them successfully. (We facilitate this very process with clients. Find out more about our approach here.)
    

3. Don’t forget about plain-old enjoyment. To stay motivated for the long term, we need to, at least somewhat, enjoy the path to achieving goals. Attempting to motivate employees solely by focusing them on the outcomes without making sure they don’t hate the process it takes to get there is a poor long-term strategy for creating well-being, meaning, and sustained motivation. Even when the path to achieving goals is at times a grind and stressful, managers can take small steps to foster an enjoyable environment that enhances positive emotion. Although these aren’t a replacement for creating psychological safety and trust, do the small things like catered lunches, happy hours, light-hearted icebreakers, and other “fun stuff.”

Help people develop confidence in their work skills. We have an innate drive to obtain mastery in life. People need to feel that they have the competency to successfully master their job, skills, and tasks. When people lack the confidence that they can succeed at a goal, they will consciously or subconsciously choose not to fully tackle it. To help people build self-confidence, we must consistently check in with them to learn about their concerns, where they lack confidence, and where they need help. (And, of course, people are more likely to be honest about these things if they have psychological safety with us.) With this information in hand, we can support, encourage, and help to provide them with the resources and tools they need to feel that they can succeed. As confidence in work tasks increases, commitment to the goals also increases.  

Help people to see the meaning and value in their goals. We all desire a sense of meaning in how we spend our time. Research at the University of Albany found that school bus drivers were more likely to stay in their jobs when they found purpose in their work. These drivers viewed themselves as making a meaningful difference in the lives of the children they transported to and from school and saw themselves as a key part of their educations. We don’t have to be feeding orphans or working on the next big sustainable energy technology to experience meaning in what we do. We just have to recognize that we are making some difference in the world. How does your organization make a positive impact in the world, community, or in individual people’s lives? Besides making a profit, why does the organization exist? Help people see that, despite their goals or specific duties, they are doing good and are part of a larger mission. Librarians act as an important support system and source of learning for community members. Customer service agents and service staff have the opportunity to make that person’s day a little better. Bus drivers ensure people get safely to and from their jobs so they can provide for their families. And as a janitor at NASA allegedly told President J.F.K. when asked what he does here, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” Meaning and purpose can be found in any job - we just need to look beyond the surface. It’s our job as managers to help people do this.  

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Motivating a team is not a quick fix and it’s not an event. It’s not about getting a Tony Robbins-style keynote speaker to pump up the crowd (sorry, Tony). It’s a process that involves understanding a bit of human psychology, getting to know and understand your employees and their drivers and demotivators, and taking consistent action over time that enhances trust, respect, and self-confidence. If you feel that you have a lot of work to do in these areas, don’t get discouraged. Start by taking action on the things that are within your control, and then add on layer after motivational layer. With commitment and consistency to this process, you’ll position your team to thrive.

Pro Tip: What About the Money?
 

Since we are motivated by reaching goals that we interpret as enhancing our success and effectiveness, then wouldn’t money be a big motivator? After all, many people feel successful when they have lots of dough, and money is also (at least to some people) a proxy for how effective we are in life.

In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink touches on what some research shows about money and motivation. Our friends across the pond, The London School of Economics, looked at 50+ studies on pay-for-performance schemes. They concluded, “[Financial] incentives may indeed reduce intrinsic motivation and diminish ethical or other reasons for complying with social norms such as fairness. As a consequence, the provision of [financial] incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”

Here’s our take on this: The research out there certainly doesn’t imply that we shouldn’t pay people well. People have to earn a living and money does matter. Money can be (and often is) a motivator. But more importantly, it can also be a demotivator if the baseline rewards aren’t adequately met. Where we believe companies run into trouble is by making financial incentives the only motivational lever they pull. Research tells us that money is not the primary motivator for people. Yes, pay people well and provide some financial incentives, but also take steps to get at the heart of what drives people. Provide people with autonomy – we all have the desire to be self-directed. Put people in a position where they can master new skills and challenges – we all want to get better at stuff. Help people find meaning and value in their work and goals – we get jazzed about being a part of something bigger than ourselves. Promote community, collaboration, psychological safety, and even a little fun.

If we can find ways to pull these levers, we can motivate people to bring their best selves to work. And even more importantly, this will help people to live more satisfying lives, and what’s more important than that?