In this time of “The Great Resignation” organizations and leaders need to create work that is intrinsically meaningful. But they often have no idea where to start. How do we create jobs that people genuinely want to do and help them become more effective and engaged in the process? Frederick Herzberg said it best: “If you want someone to do a good job, give them a good job to do.” Motivational Work Design offers a framework for creating a truly competitive work product.
The pandemic fundamentally changed how we work. For almost two years, offices around the world stood empty and people did their jobs from home. Now, as companies eye returning to in-person work, they face some harsh realities. As fellow consultant Joe Spadaford points out: “We have an increasingly remote workforce where staff need to perform at a high level without direct supervision. We have difficulty finding and retaining talent—with staff turnover at record levels, leaving many positions unfilled. We also have issues with staff placed in unproductive roles, and not adding enough value to the organization. These are real challenges!”
Organizations must also factor in the altered expectations of their workforce. It is no secret that people seek more meaning in their lives, but what’s new is the predominance of work-life in this exploration. With more time for self-reflection during the pandemic, many employees are now asking themselves what they want and need from work, and it goes well beyond a bigger paycheck. Those who determine that their current role isn’t delivering on their deeper needs, are looking for greener pastures elsewhere. And with so many jobs available, they’re finding plenty of places to apply.
The pandemic is also amplifying some long-standing trends in the workplace: employee engagement has run stubbornly low for the last fifteen years and, according to Gallup, no more than a third of the workforce is seen as engaged. Younger generations – the Millennials and Gen Z – entering the workforce display a different set of expectations than their predecessors: they seek purpose and meaning; expect technology to work; demand opportunities to grow; and change jobs more quickly if those expectations go unmet.
The struggle for talent is real – especially for those in knowledge-intensive industries. So how can today’s leaders retain and attract workers with shifting employee expectations and a tight labor market? We’re seeing some creative solutions. Many organizations are rolling out hybrid work models, revamping salary structures, investing in employer rebranding efforts, and publishing purpose statements. But in most cases, the response to the talent challenge falls flat because it fails to consider the most important variable: the design of the work itself.
The underlying issue for employers struggling to retain and recruit talent is that their offering is not competitive. Besides compensation, the biggest factor is the design of the job – the product they are trying to sell to their customer, the employee or candidate. And the way we typically define jobs lies at the heart of the problem. When hiring, leaders copy and paste job descriptions, organizational structures, and process designs from past positions. This is just one of the reasons job descriptions within a certain industry or function tend to look alike. We are essentially making job design decisions based on outdated industrial era models, where people had specialized roles and elaborate hierarchies managed and controlled how work got done. What we fail to consider, though, is that these industrial models are ill-suited for the design of knowledge work. They fail to address the fundamental psychological needs of those we want to do the job. And that is no longer acceptable.
Not content to just bring home the bacon, today’s humans want work that we perceive to be meaningful, autonomy to decide when and how to do it, technology and tools that enable us, and knowledge of the result or how well we did. When these deeper needs are met, we experience work as motivating. When they are not, however, it can lead to employee disengagement and turnover. Extensive research over the last fifty years has proven this point again and again we’re seeing the results in today’s “Big Quit.” But, when done right, work design can provide a solution.
Identifying Work Design Opportunities
The starting point for any work design effort is to identify where within an organization it could make a difference. Various survey-based tools can identify specific jobs that could be improved and where these jobs are lacking in regard to five underlying drivers:
- Autonomy: The ability to use judgment and discretion
- Feedback: Doing the work provides feedback
- Purpose: The outcome is very important to others
- Entirety: Being responsible for the entire work product
- Variety: Being able to apply a broad range of skills
- Tech: The technology used is fit for purpose
With that data in hand, companies can zero in on where work is broken and what is missing from their job offerings. They can then start to build the necessary leadership commitment to act, an imperative piece in the puzzle.
How To Redesign Work for Impact
To be successful, a work design effort requires an integrated approach. It must be tied to the organization’s goals and culture to ensure a good fit for those participating. From there, deliberately designing jobs to be intrinsically motivating is surprisingly straightforward. Here are the five basic principles behind a work design effort:
- Analyze the content of a particular job – what is done that needs to be done, and what is being done that is not. For example, you could decide how to eliminate reports that no one uses or free up employees from non-mission critical tasks.
- Combine tasks that fit together, creating natural work units or clusters, to create a functional work design – which often involves creating teams that own the work product from start to finish.
- Create direct client relationships to generate direct feedback and increase accountability.
- Increase autonomy – if you give people the necessary knowledge, tools, and training to be accountable for work, then you can ‘vertically load’ some of the management responsibilities as well as tasks.
- Provide direct and immediate feedback. When employees get immediate feedback from doing the work itself or directly from the customer, they are much more likely to feel engaged and empowered in their role.
As work design expert John Uzzi puts it: “Drop the carrot, drop the stick. Bring meaning.” Clearly this is an idea whose time has come.
Implementing the Design
So how do you begin implementing a motivational work design model? Should it be top down, or is an incremental approach from the bottom up better? The answer is simple: The more you engage people in developing their own design, the better. Leadership needs be on-board because without buy-in, nothing will happen. But those actually doing the work must be involved and encouraged to offer their ideas and suggestions for how redesign the work. Without that, it’s hard to make meaningful, lasting change. As John Uzzi, a leading expert on motivation work design notes: “The more you can engage people in and the more you get them to design their own work, the better. They are the people who know it. And if they don’t know they will know that. And they will tell you that and then figure out who does know it.”
What are the Benefits of Work Design?
Redesigning work to be fit for humans has benefits that extend far beyond having a more engaged workforce. You also see:
- Direct feedback from the customer, a streamlined process, and start-to-finish ownership and accountability for the work product reduces the need for layer upon layer of supervision to manage performance and coordinate how work gets done. It also results in a better customer experience, which is especially important for service businesses.
- Leaders of work design efforts can develop a competitive work product: jobs that are intrinsically motivating and productive.
- Companies that embrace work design often achieve remarkable results: Reduced turnover, improved customer satisfaction, higher productivity, and lower cost.
How Do You Know if Work Design is Right for You?
Are you seeing high employee turnover and low customer satisfaction? Then you might be a perfect fit for this solution. But what about cutting costs? You don’t start a work design effort to simply save money – you do it because you want to create a better workplace and offer a higher service or product for your customers. You probably will save money along the way, but it should not be the main driver for work design. Work design is not a one-size-fits-all solution and should be tailored to its context and company culture. And it might not be appropriate when the work itself is distasteful, technology drives everything, or the organization is too small to have it make a real impact.
Conclusion
An effective work design effort can be a powerful tool in an organization’s arsenal to reduce turnover in this unprecedented time of competing for talent. Often, the approach can also help people grow into larger roles in the workplace. And if done well, a work design effort can have a dramatic positive impact on people’s lives. As we emerge from the pandemic, meaningfulness, doing things right, and doing the right things is becoming more and more important. Motivational work design provides a unique opportunity to foster increased meaning and engagement in our occupations – an important aspect of our lives. As many companies question whether and how to bring people back to the office, work design can offer a powerful framework that allows people to work more independently, foster engagement, reduce turnover, and create scalability. In the words of Joe Spadaford, “We want our organizations to be both efficient and effective, so we should make sure most jobs are well designed in this digital world.” We couldn’t agree more.