The Autotelic Employee: Harnessing Flow States for Peak Performance and Fulfilment
Have you noticed that recent events have caused us to give long-overdue consideration to what’s essential in life? 2020 has changed more than where and how we work. Being forced to face our mortality and that of our loved ones has accelerated us towards a far more primitive point of inflection. An uprising is afoot, and most organisations are ill-prepared to meet the emerging needs and expectations of the workforce.
Many talented and ambitious individuals have invested years in unfulfilling careers. They persevere in occupations that don’t provide a good fit for their abilities, appeased by the big house, new car and exotic holidays. Most lack the motivation or insightful leadership necessary to begin a journey of personal awareness and growth. Instead, people clock-in each day and take home a paycheque at the end of each month, never realising their full potential.
Society is slowly becoming wise to the emptiness of materialistic living, and beginning to crave a more meaningful, enjoyable, and less stressful existence. We are reconnecting with the full spectrum of our fundamental human needs and seeking environments and experiences to meet them.
In this article, I explore the intersection of two well-known theories in positive psychology, against the backdrop of the current corporate environment. I intend to define a pathway to more human-centric organisations with more fulfilling careers for those who work in them.
Human Needs
We know basic human needs are a powerful motivator of human behaviour. Abraham Maslow defined this phenomenon in his five-tier Hierarchy of Needs (figure 1). The lower needs in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up. When a need has been ‘more or less’ met, it gives way to activities directed towards satisfying the next set of needs that we have yet to fulfil.
We all begin with non-negotiable physiological needs (food, water, warmth and rest) and safety needs (physical security and protection). Consider these material needs that are generally provided for by our monthly salary. Beyond that, we have psychological needs of belongingness and esteem. Finally, we are all driven by an urge for self-actualisation: a concept involving what Maslow described as ‘living according to one’s full potential’ and ‘becoming who we really are.’
With the obvious exception of those who lost their job or income during the Covid19 pandemic, employees across Australia and New Zealand have benefited from increased investment to meet their basic needs. As a consequence, modern corporate life has helped create a stable platform from which employees can contemplate their higher-order needs. However, most companies have not yet considered, nor are they equipped to deliver upon the psychological and self-actualisation needs of their employees.
Fortunately, there are leading-edge techniques that corporate leaders can embrace to meet the emerging needs of the workforce, which I’ll share below.
Corporate Environment
Last week I was speaking to a prominent leader of an Australian technology business. The theme of employee needs arose, and the conversation evolved to recognise that we are failing our leaders and the teams they lead. When recruiting or promoting staff, we preference hard skills and experience over innate human abilities. To the detriment of trust, we underinvest in the development of soft skills like diplomacy, compassion, empathy and emotional intelligence. We have created an efficient but dysfunctional environment where people conceal their opinion and feelings for fear of ostracisation — at the same time, reinforcing the behaviour by following systems and processes designed to meet commercial benchmarks.
We already see the worrying impact of this type of mentally unhealthy corporate environment. In Australia and New Zealand, we rate our overall quality of life higher than any other global region while paradoxically reporting some of the lowest employee engagement scores (Gallup — State of the Global Workplace). Just 14% are engaged in their job, showing up every day with enthusiasm and the motivation to be highly productive. Another 15% of employees are actively disengaged — not only unhappy at work but determined to undermine their colleagues’ positive efforts. The remaining 71% of employees fall into the “not engaged” category; they show up each day but only do what is necessary. More concerningly, one in five Australians (21%) has taken time off work in the past 12 months because they felt stressed, anxious, depressed or mentally unwell. This statistic is more than twice as high (46%) among those who consider their workplace mentally unhealthy. Employees who believe their workplace is mentally unhealthy are unlikely to disclose if they are experiencing a mental health condition, seek support from HR/management, or offer support to a colleague. (Beyond Blue — State of Workplace Mental Health in Australia).
The necessity to work from home has exacerbated the problem for employers. A barrier to connection now exists between colleagues and managers, compounded by a significant reduction in impromptu social interaction. The signs of distress have become much more difficult to identify and interventions more challenging to administer. Digitally empowered individuals are thinking far more creatively about when, how and where they want to work. People feel renewed determination to increase harmony between work and personal life — amplified by the current dichotomy between the quality of work and non-work life referenced earlier.
Conscious Organisations
The employee of 2020 is a different animal to anything we have seen before. They are voicing more sophisticated needs and prioritising investment in their individual progression. A Flexible and integrated experience of life and work in an expectation and they place a far higher value in meaning and purpose. Conscious employees present a significant challenge for employers but also a huge opportunity. In a study of 2000 workers by the Harvard Business Review, only 1 respondent in 20 said their current role was as meaningful as it could be. In the same study, more than 9 out of 10 employees said they would be willing to sacrifice a percentage (on average 23%) of their lifetime earnings to do more meaningful work. The report also suggested bottom-line benefits for employers, such as increased productivity and longer employee tenure. A similar study from pwc showed that 83% of employees value meaning in their day to day work as a top priority. It also showed that millennials are 5.3x times more likely to stay with an organisation when they have a deep connection to their employer’s mission. Non-millennials are 2.3x more likely to stay. However, only 35% of organisations reward employees who demonstrate values or behaviours aligned to the purpose.
Throughout history, people have relied upon institutions and structures of collective belief to find purpose and direction. However, examples such as religion and political affiliation are proving increasingly less attractive to many. A vacuum now exists in our society that corporate institutions have the opportunity to fill. By consciously considering all of our human needs and orientating around meaningful causes, organisations can become the new bastions of modern society. Providing employees with a far more fulfilling experience of work, and in doing so, achieving loyalty, productivity and business performance.
So how might we design an organisation which acknowledges people’s intrinsic motivations, and embraces the responsibility to create an environment which provides meaning and the conditions for personal growth? How might we create organisations that act as engines for enhancing our quality of life?
First, we should recognise that recent attempts have fallen short. Top-down initiatives promoting values alignment and employee experience have failed to improve the experience of work or quality of life for the worker. Defining organisational values and selling the virtues of joining a company to which your values align has proven to be a well-intended empty promise.
The adoption and experience of company values in day to day operational practices are wildly inconsistent, which is problematic for employee engagement, especially when the apparently ‘aligned’ values are infringed upon by ‘commercial business decisions. We only have to look at the values of the Australian banking sector relative to the findings of The Banking Royal Commission to realise how hollow a values program can be. As an example, the values of the Commonwealth Bank at the time of The Royal Commission were integrity, accountability, collaboration, excellence, and service. The values of Westpac were integrity, service, one team, courage and achievement. Integrity, in particular, is at odds with the findings both from the perspective of their customers and the employees.
Similarly, employee experience initiatives have provided beautiful and elegant journeys to process employees from attraction to au revoir. However, these seem to be little more than an exercise in securing a cost-effective market share of talent rather than recognising and supporting the essential needs of the employee. That is not to say that these initiatives are not valuable. Instead, that alone and without skilled leaders who embody them, they fail to provide a suitably engaging and developmental work environment.
Autotelic Work
Autotelic: an activity, process, person or personality containing its own meaning or purpose; deriving meaning and purpose from within.
What if, by harnessing the momentum building at the employee grassroots, we could transform work from an activity of extrinsic motivation to an autotelic pursuit; where the opportunity to do your best work is in itself the reward? Fortunately, this isn’t as ludicrous as it may first seem. It’s a theory founded in science and backed by more than one hundred years of research. In 2003, in his book Good Business, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (a Hungarian psychologist and leading researcher on positive psychology) outlined a framework to achieve this very objective based upon the science of flow.
Flow, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the fully immersive mental state in which a person has the feeling of energised focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of performing an activity. In flow, a cocktail of neurochemicals (dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide and serotonin) floods the brain. It creates the most potent and pleasure-inducing experience known to occur in the human body. It makes flow states highly addictive and is what motivates individuals to repeatedly pursue activities that trigger them, irrespective of extrinsic motivation. Including work-related activities — which is the key to making work autotelic. Thanks to recent advances in neuroscience, we now know how to create the conditions for flow reliably and can design organisations and operational practices to mimic these conditions.
Why bother? In a 10-year study conducted by McKinsey, top executives reported being five times more productive in flow. In fact, according to these same McKinsey researchers, if we could increase the time we spend in flow by 15–20%, overall workplace productivity would almost double.
The state of flow also has significant implications for learning outcomes. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for example, found that military snipers trained in a state of flow learned 230% faster than usual. Scientists at Advanced Brain Monitoring in Carlsbad, California, ran a parallel civilian study and found that flow cut in half the amount of time it took to train novice marksmen up to the expert level. In similar experiments, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSWDG), commonly known as SEAL Team Six, has been able to reduce a six-month cycle time for learning foreign languages down to six weeks.
Flow is also associated with higher levels of creativity. It allows us to finally abandon futile attempts to teach people how to be creative, in favour of teaching them how to achieve a creative state of mind.
Creating the conditions for flow
There are four primary “flow factors” for leaders to consider when creating a professional environment that fosters flow. These range from interventions at the individual level to organisation-wide initiatives.
1. Eliminate Distraction
When practising the art of flow, one of the core principles to remember is that flow flows focus. In the absence of distraction, an individual is far more likely to enter the state of flow. However, social media, news media, email, collaboration tools, open-plan offices, and always on mobility make this almost impossible. As a result, it’s critical to find environments and create habits which eliminate noise and maximise focused concentration when you want to access flow regularly.
Distraction also arises in another form — doubt. Our mind continually challenges us to consider if we are doing the right thing in the right way. Our innate fear of failure strongly influences our actions and ability to remain focused on the task at hand. Fortunately, there are several things we can do to reduce doubt at work. Firstly, we can ensure individuals are clear on their goals and that they understand how the tasks they undertake contribute to achieving them. We can also provide an understanding of the alignment between individual goals and the overarching goals of the organisation. Lastly, we can ensure that by meeting their personal goals, people experience the feeling of direct contribution to the vision, mission and purpose of the company.
The macro-feedback experienced when contributing to the greater good must be accompanied by micro-feedback, which reenforces or redirects day to day activity. Having access to regular feedback is critical in suppressing the feeling of doubt. There are three types of feedback that we can promote.
· Feedback from others: immediate and specific feedback which focuses on the performance of the task rather than the performance of the individual This approach reduces the stress of receiving feedback and increased the learning potential.
· Feedback from the activity itself: having benchmarks to gauge one’s efforts which are a bi-product of performing a task. Such feedback is proven to increase the level of enjoyment provided by the activity.
· Feedback from one’s personal standards: Coaching individuals to develop and apply their own standards and a sense of what constitutes a job well done relative to them.
Before proceeding to the final two flow factors, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect upon the challenge of meeting employee needs. I noted earlier a rise in prominence of psychological needs (which include the need for belonging and the need for esteem). By setting clear goals with alignment to the company’s purpose, organisations can make a meaningful contribution to the sense of belonging felt by an individual. Similarly, prioritising feedback which motivates and supports the achievement of an individual’s goals, can engender a feeling of accomplishment. Amplification occurs when the activity contributes to a higher purpose.
2. Provide Autonomy and Control
Having autonomy and control over one’s job is key to accessing the state of flow. That doesn’t mean you can only access flow if you are in control of every variable. Rather, people must be free to choose how to perform a particular task or achieve a goal and be trusted that they would come up with the best approach that any given situation requires.
This freedom should include discretion of when and where to work. Considered alongside the current and possible future working from home arrangements, this level of flexibility offers a potent tool for the development of a harmonious work-life balance and improved employee engagement. If accompanied by the intrinsic motivation provided by flow and a thorough goal-setting framework, this extent of choice also represents a low level of risk.
The final element of control to understand is control over one’s mind. I touched briefly upon elimination of doubt earlier, and there are other tricks the mind can play to kick us out of flow too. A critical capability that we should all be trying to master is mindfulness. Which, as a tool for centring and calming oneself is of vital importance. Alone, this is justification for developing your practice. However, a less discussed outcome of regular mindfulness practise is the ability to observe one’s thoughts and control the subject of one’s attention. As an example, I like to think of the mindfulness practice of meditation as the training of the “attention muscle”. Different variations of meditation encourage bringing our attention to a particular point of focus; such as the breath, an area of the body or a mantra. When thoughts divert attention, we are encouraged to bring it back to the point of focus. The act of observing a distraction and being able to redirect our attention purposefully is a useful skill in managing the interruptions of modern life. The more you practice mediation, the better you become at directing your attention and the higher the likelihood of entering flow.
The final flow factor to consider is also the last piece of the jigsaw for organisations aspiring to support the apex human needs — self-fulfilment. Flow is considerably more common for those who align day to day work with their abilities. What’s more, by developing the skills necessary to support this approach, leaders can better support the psychological needs of their teams and drastically improve team performance.
3. Match Challenges to Abilities
People quickly grow tired of a job if it remains unfulfilling, becoming disengaged, or worse actively disengaged, as a result. Good leaders counter this by providing variety, challenge and by allowing their teams the opportunity to continually develop and refine their capabilities through the day to day activity.
An individual experiences flow when facing an activity with a high level of challenge combined with a high level of competence in the abilities required. In such a situation, the difficulty of the problem necessitates focusing on the task at hand. Simultaneously, the confidence instilled by the high level of relative ability eliminates the distracting feeling of doubt.
A good flow activity is one that offers a very high ceiling of opportunity for improvement of abilities. They hold us at the emotional midpoint between anxiety and boredom, in what scientists call the flow channel. Flow inducing activities should stretch us but not to the point of breaking. Or, in more practical terms, the challenge should always be about 4% greater than our existing abilities.
As shown below (figure 2), when performing a task regularly, an individual’s relative abilities will improve and eventually render the activity too easy. At which point, the individual will move out of the flow state and into a state of boredom. As such, it is necessary to increase the level of challenge (by 4%) to remain in flow. Similarly, if by increasing the level of difficulty a task exceeds current abilities, flow will be replaced by a state of anxiety. In this situation, developing new capabilities or breaking the task down into less challenging components will make flow accessible once more. It is this interplay, fuelled by the addiction to being in flow, which delivers personal growth, development and ultimately self-fulfilment. These cycles can continue almost indefinitely given the correct level of attention and leadership.
Observing how our feelings change relative to different combinations of challenges and abilities is critical in developing an emotionally connected corporate environment. Csikszentmihalyi was able to map eight core emotions that may be experienced at work relative to day to day activity and a person’s level of ability (figure 3). When people perceive themselves to be above their average level of challenge and ability, they experience flow, as described above. The opposite is the state of apathy, where both challenges and abilities are low. Other combinations of challenges and abilities produce feelings of worry, anxiety and arousal (when challenges outweigh abilities), or control, relaxation and boredom (when abilities outweigh challenges).
As we discovered in the Beyond Blue report earlier, one in five Australians has taken time off work in the past 12 months because they felt stressed, anxious, depressed or mentally unhealthy. This framework contributes to combating that trend by providing an approach and shared language which enables leaders and their teams to have emotionally richer conversations about day to day business. It also provides a roadmap to enact rapid interventions (such as increasing challenge or development of abilities) to transition people from less desirable to more positive emotional states and ultimately towards the state of flow.
There will always be room for improvement in how often we access flow. According to surveys conducted by the Gallup Organisation, between 15% and 20% of adults never seem to experience flow, while a comparable number claim to experience it every day. The other 60% -70% report being intensely involved in what they do anywhere between once every few months to at least once a week. This disparity is a telling indication of how great a possibility exists for raising the quality of life overall and presents a tremendous opportunity for leaders who are committed to enhancing fulfilment and productivity by creating an Autotelic workplace.
Autotelic Life
There is also a range of habits we can adopt in our non-work life to increase our access to the state of flow. I’ll outline these in a future post, or if you want to know now, drop me a line at stephen@autotelic.com.au, and we can schedule a time to talk.
References:
Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2004. Good Business, Leadership, flow and the making of meaning. 6th ed. Great Britain: Hodder & Stoughton.
https://hbr.org/2018/11/9-out-of-10-people-are-willing-to-earn-less-money-to-do-more-meaningful-work
https://flowleadership.org/flow-leadership-and-serious-games-a-pedagogical-perspective-1st-part/
https://visme.co/blog/how-to-unlock-creative-potential/
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/257552/state-global-workplace-2017.aspx
