Apart from the fact I’m not much of a motivator, I don’t believe any organisation should try to motivate its employees.

That’s what we are trying to do in Basis — not to motivate anyone.

Instead, we try and enable people to do meaningful work.

Consider this (radical?) idea: motivational practices were invented to plaster over the fact that many people have lost the meaning in their work.

Motivation is a weak surrogate, compensating for the loss of meaning. We lost this because much of our work is fragmented, we don’t see why we do our jobs (apart from the paycheck) or the impacts our efforts have.

I’m not the first to be sceptical of motivation. I first heard this idea in 1995. It changed how I think about organisations forever.

It comes from a book by Burkard Sievers called Work, Death, and Life Itself — Essays on Management and Organisation. Unfortunately, not many people know the book. I don’t understand why it didn’t gain more readers; I think the ideas from Burkard Sievers are as relevant as ever.

Sievers’ argument, in summary, was this (warning — this goes deep!):

1. The knowledge accumulated in the last 70 years on motivation and leadership in organisations is disturbing: motivation is seen to be synonymous with management and focusses on optimising the fit between individuals and organisations.
2. Motivation became an issue when meaning was lost from the workplace. This is a result of the splits and fragmentation inherent in the way work is now organised.
3. The majority of organisations are characterised by
   a) a separation between managers and workers and
   b) splitting authority, responsibility, skills, knowledge and even activity. This has the effect of regarding workers as ‘stupid’ and thus fragmenting activities, so they require less skill to operate. The division of work into fractional tasks makes the control of employees necessary and easier, as well as spurning a new class of professional managers.
4. For employees, the complete unawareness of the overall context of what one is doing is hugely demoralising. Therefore, artificial motivation becomes essential as a substitute for the lack of meaningfulness.
5. The fragmentation tendency inevitably extends to the artificial splitting of life itself into working life and the remainder of it as work becomes merely a transaction between the worker and employer without much context or deeper meaning.

So, what should we do instead?

Organisations should realise that they can only survive if they rely on ‘adults’ who look upon work as essential in leading a useful and meaningful life.

This should be more than a company mission statement; it should be integral to the work itself.

And this can’t be a top-down mandate. Organisations must allow their members individual room for meaning. They must include them in the search, creation and maintenance of meaning and, therefore, in the broader sense, in the design and management of the organisation.

Organisations should see work as an essential dimension of leading a useful and meaningful life. This should be more than a company mission statement; it should be integral to the work itself.

And this can’t be a top-down mandate. Organisations must allow their members individual room for meaning. They must include them in the search, creation and maintenance of meaning and, therefore, in the broader sense, in the design and management of the organisation.

This sounds theoretical. It is not. It has been put into experiments and successful practice.

In the 90’s there were pioneers like Eckhart Wintzen and Ricardo Semler. More recently organisations have been researched and sometimes described as ‘Teal’ organisations by Frederique Laloux and ‘Corporate Rebels’.

In social impact organisations, my field of work, there are also important examples. Thankfully! Especially in public services, in my view, the fragmentation work and extension of the industrial logic of production lines has gone too far.

Hilary Cottam makes this argument better than anyone else but has also developed practical initiatives in her work leading Participle.

In adult social care and health, Jos de Blok’s ‘Buurtzorg’, provides an example at scale. In the UK, this was picked up by Mairi Martin & Edel Harris at Cornerstone, as well as by Helen Sanderson with Wellbeing teams.

Others are now trying to turn these ideas into practices within existing public services — just as we at Basis try to do.

I have no idea how many (if any) of these people have read Burkard Sievers. Regardless, all of these are pioneers are, I think, pursuing the same core idea.

It might well be an idea whose time has come — and as we know, there is nothing more powerful than that.