People Not Paperclips. Kath Howard

for the future? It’s wonderful to have a five-year plan mapped out, but ever-deferred engagement doesn’t help anyone to feel happy at work. This is where creative job design, stretch assignments or stretch objectives, fostering innovation and creativity in the workplace and encouraging flexibility beyond the ‘bum on a seat’ needs to be parked in yesteryear.

       The search for meaning at work, and the link to social contact and control

      So how can we find greater meaning at work, and why does this matter to us in HR? Like other fields, HR professionals often seek new shiny objects (ideas) that will help people to perform better. For these new insights to shift from distractions to sustainable, value-added practices, they need to be examined more rigorously. Spending time exploring the evidence-base for an intervention, particularly when it’s new and shiny so doesn’t have one yet, is often placed into the ‘too hard box’ by HR practitioners. I’ve certainly been guilty of this in the past, perhaps because the intervention just seems so obviously positive. How could it possibly fail to increase people’s job satisfaction? However, spending time upfront defining your hypothesis, or rather what you’re trying to affect or explore, based on hopefully at least a bit of an understanding of the current evidence-base, will stand us all in good stead to avoid spending a lot of time and money on quick fixes that fix very little.

      We’ve established that people are searching for meaning; a search for meaning in life in general, but this applies just as much to the workplace. If we are all hankering after meaning in our work, why have so many people got jobs where, quite frankly, pay is the only real motivator for showing up? Pay, or the fear of not receiving any pay, of course. Try as they might to find meaning, challenge and room for autonomy, this work situation often leaves them looking for just the bare basics of a salary. Gallup research, which some rate and some question for its reliability, has found that 90% of people surveyed spend half their waking lives doing things they would rather not be doing at places they would rather not be; they’re working in jobs they despise, or at best tolerate. I’ve been challenged on this topic a few times when discussing how we can create meaning and social connection in all organisations. One challenge came from an old colleague who asked me: ‘How on earth can you think people packing sanitary towels in a factory are searching for meaning from their work?’ You’ll see I haven’t abridged the question for you. I really can think that, and I do, and it’s based on a whole host of research on the importance of social connection. For a full deep-dive into the topic, please refer to fantastic books in social psychology such as The Social Animal, by Elliot Aronson.⁵ For a more anecdotal approach from me, please read on. And please note that I don’t share my stories as ‘pseudo-evidence’. They are stories to illustrate my own experience, and often in an attempt to bring the research I am citing to life a little for you. Our next chapter focuses on evidence-based practice in HR, and the irony of this is not lost on me.

      So, how does engagement and job satisfaction apply to people who aren’t in typical high-flying careers, or what in the United Kingdom at least were once known as ‘white collar jobs’? I worked as a chambermaid cleaning up sick, owl poo (yes, somehow this is true) and goodness knows what else at the weekend and during holidays before starting university. I was, broadly speaking, motivated in that role. It wasn’t just the money; I wasn’t rolling in it as a sixteen-year-old chambermaid. The camaraderie and the laughter amongst the chambermaids, the porters and the people in the laundry was brilliant. It was hard work in every sense, but I got up after sometimes two hours’ sleep from a night of dancing to carry hefty hoovers up and down flights of stairs at 8 am. I was engaged. Or I was when I wasn’t hiding in cleaning cupboards eating leftover pastries. (How did I end up in HR? Goodness knows.) Meaning at work comes from a wide range of factors, but we can tap into this and make virtually any workplace more engaging and more ‘human’ for our people. Why do I now labour this point? I value fairness and compassion above all else, and I have a strong ‘elitism radar’. I don’t want to write a book that seeks to bring humanity into only the head offices of the richest companies in the world, though goodness they need it, and if I’m honest I miss working somewhere with a swimming pool in the building. This is, and should be, for everyone. I’m not so naïve to think that people working in unsafe factories on less than the legal national minimum wage work for people who are about to pick up this book. We have another fight to fight for those people, and it’s beyond the realms of this book. We need to put the human back into HR for these people. It’s not all about the people who get free food in swanky offices – we’re designing the future of work for all, and these people sadly aren’t the majority.

      So, what does motivate people and what can we learn from this in HR? The behavioural economist, Dan Ariely,⁶ has said that ‘when we think about how people work, the naïve intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze’. In line with the motivation theories of the greats such as Maslow,⁷ Ariely conducted research in 2008 that found we are motivated by far more than money and comfort incentives, such as free fruit, or even by the offer of working and being paid for less hours through flexible working. We are driven by the meaning found in our work, by the support and acknowledgement of others and, interestingly, also by how challenging the task is. Ariely found that the harder the task is, the prouder we are in achieving this, and this research supports my point above that people are complex creatures and our motivations for joining a company, performing well there and then choosing to stay can be wide-ranging and complex. I have shared feeling motivated and potentially ‘happy’ as a chambermaid. This could have been because it was only a couple of days a week at most and represented disposable income rather than my life’s work. I don’t know. I certainly didn’t feel the same job satisfaction in my foray as a call centre worker. I lasted four days, four long days, before calling the agency and saying I couldn’t go back. The crunch factor for me wasn’t even clocking on or off the phones to go to the toilet (and having this logged as a ‘statistic’, rather than a pretty basic human function), or the fact that I was trying to sell some phone-related gadget to people who neither wanted nor needed it. No, the crunch factor was watching our statistics put on the whiteboard and our Call Centre Manager jumping up and down when someone exceeded their targets. I honestly couldn’t have cared less. There was zero meaning in that role for me, and zero social contact to bolster the lack of meaning in the activities themselves. Social exchanges were precisely timed, and actively discouraged. I know call centre environments have moved on greatly in 20 years, but back then they were the battery farms of the workplace. Twenty-eight long hours. And please bear in mind that I managed to find joy cleaning up after people in an expensive hotel, serving food in a Chinese restaurant on a wage of next-to-nothing and developing endless photos in a shop. Social contact and an element of control – this shouldn’t be the rocket science of effective job design.

       Revisiting the impact of pay on how we motivate our people

      Can money be a strong motivator? We know that money is a ‘hygiene factor’; not enough and we feel demotivated, but increasing amounts will not result in ever-increasing happiness. However, Ariely, who I introduced a moment ago, has found in controlled laboratory experiments that the less appreciated we feel our work is, the more money we want to be paid to do it. So of course, as always suspected, money matters a great deal to people – however, it is the value it represents on our worth that makes a difference here. This is why paying people equitably, when they’ve performed well, or their role has grown significantly, really matters. It’s not the numbers on the payslip, it’s the value you are placing on their worth at work. I will share a specific example with you. Ariely conducted a study, published in Psychological Science,⁸ where he gave students at MIT a piece of paper filled with random letters and asked them to find the pairs of identical letters on the paper. Each time they did the activity, they were offered less money than the previous time to play. Those in the first group wrote their names on their sheets and handed them to the experimenter, who simply said ‘Uh huh’ before putting it in a pile. People in the second group didn’t write down their names, and the experimenter put their sheets in a pile without looking at them. People in the third group had their work shredded immediately upon completion. What did they find? People whose work was shredded needed twice as much money as those whose work was acknowledged in order to keep doing the task. People in the second group, whose work was saved but ignored, needed