People actually want to work
“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
Norm Kerth
The industrial revolution brought with it many large organisations. The “factory” was born, creating anything from textiles to cars. These companies had “white collar workers” (the managers) and “blue collar workers” (manual labourers) at the bottom. It was a manager’s job to control the blue collar workers, and make sure they worked hard and got the job done effectively. This was how organisations were structured, intelligent business people managing teams of low-skilled workers.
Now we have many more large organisations, but far fewer manual labourers. In many large organisations we now have “highly skilled workers” (often graduates) starting at the bottom of these companies. We also have a new type of manufacturing company; ones that make things that are digital (Facebook, Spotify, Netflix). In these organisations, the labourers that build the (software) products are highly skilled people (e.g. programmers), who really enjoy what they do. So now, we have many large companies, but there are highly skilled workers from top to bottom.
In the bigger cities, there is also much freer movement of labour. These employees are now able to freely move from job to job if they feel like it. This puts them in the lucky position of being able to find a job that they really enjoy, and the labour market is fluid enough to allow this. For these people, work is not just about earning money (as it generally was for the manual labourer), as they can choose from a wide range of jobs at a similar salary. Therefore, for these people, work is just as much about finding something that challenges them and gives them a sense of achievement, rather than just earning money to live.
If these people want to work for an organisation, then they must be motivated by something about that company, whether it be the culture, the product that it produces, or the difference it makes in the world. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be there, as they have a lot of choice and can leave quite easily. However, despite the change in the labour market, a lot of these organisations are still set up like organisations from the industrial revolution, and act like they need to control their workers.
Here are a few ways that organisations try to control these people:
Demand regular reports on what has been done
In several different companies I’ve seen employees have to make daily reports to bosses, both written and verbally. This adds no real value, and makes employees feel like they are at school. This is a waste of time for motivated, talented individuals. It can become very stressful when things aren’t going well, as people seek to find reason why they shouldn’t be blamed.
Set them harsh deadlines or targets to hit
I’ve ranted on before about how dangerous targets can be. Some deadlines might be critical (e.g. when a newspaper goes to press) but many aren’t. Many deadlines and pretty much all targets are made up to try to motivate people to work harder. But if the employee is already motivated then this isn’t necessary, and instead can lead to many bad outcomes, such as
- Stopping/slowing work when a target is reached/met deadline early
- Trying to hit a target when it might have made sense to do something different
- Demotivating if the target was not reached, despite trying their best
Give bonuses based on individual performance
There are some lines of work where this might make sense (trading, recruitment), however these are often very stressful places to work. In most other places, bonus time will often become unpleasant. Motivated employees don’t need more money to become more motivated. So the only outcome of bonus time is that they become demotivated if they disagree with their performance rating, or the amount that the company has put in the bonus pot.
A lot of these practices are actually used so that an organisation can find someone to blame if something isn’t going well. They are tools to control the employee, to make sure they are working hard. But actually, if the employee would work hard naturally, then the only outcome is that they demotivate the employee if not done perfectly.
A large problem with organisations where there is a culture of “command and control”, is that when something goes wrong, then people quickly try to cover it up. They start to bloat their personal reports, they try to hit their target despite the fact that everything else is falling apart, and they generally try to blame others to save their face/bonus. Not only is this unpleasant, but totally unnecessary if people were genuinely trying hard. And what’s even worse, it means that the root cause of the under-performance is covered up. People are scared to open up about what went wrong, in case it looks bad on them.
Instead, if we stop taking all these actions to control employees, we can create a culture where people don’t feel the need to scapegoat. We can create an environment where people feel comfortable talking openly and honestly about what isn’t going well. If we assume that everyone was trying their best, then we can really find out what went wrong, and try to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.
In this open environment, it will become much more clear if employees are demotivated. They’ll probably say so! If this is the case, then this means one of two things:
- The organisation is no longer an exciting place to work.
- The organisation isn’t hiring people that are motivated by what they do.
Both of these things are really important to know, so that they can be fixed!
For organisations that are fighting to hire high quality employees, in locations where it is easy to move around jobs, then they need to stop acting like they are recruiting “blue collar workers” and remove mechanisms that control these employees. They should stop checking how many hours employees put in, minimise signing off work, simplify long-winded governance processes, reduce reports to management, remove unnecessary deadlines and stop trying to incentivise good performance. The employees will already be motivated, so these mechanisms will only serve to demotivate them.
In this environment, we wouldn’t have scape-goating, we wouldn’t have a blame culture and we would minimise stress. If we assume everyone is trying their best, then this creates an open culture, allowing the organisation to both continually improve and retain their highly skilled employees.
If you enjoyed reading please give some 👏 and/or leave a comment. For more stories like this check out my publication, The Agile Mindset.
