Designing Jobs that People Like: The Motivating Potential Score
Essentially, 2 out of every 3 people show up to their workplace every day wishing they were anywhere else. Mondays are a drag and getting to Friday is the goal. They are disengaged in their work and are on the lookout for better job opportunities.
14% are not only disengaged but actively disengaged in their work. These are the ones napping in the warehouse, stealing office supplies, and using up sick days when they’re not sick. If you’ve seen The Office, you’ve seen the 14% in action. They’re actually sabotaging the mission of the organization.
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Engaged
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Disengaged
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Actively Disengaged
- In 2000 and 2005, only 26% of employees were engaged at work.
- In 2007, 20% were actively disengaged. That’s 1 in every 5 people working against the purposes of their company.
Can you imagine what the quality of life must be like for this group of people who have to spend 40 hours a week in a place they hate? The spillover effect that this has on families, neighbourhoods, and society, in general, is incalculable.
And then there’s the lost revenue, of course. Yikes.
- Lower absenteeism
- Fewer safety incidents
- Fewer quality defects
- Less employee turnover
- Higher productivity
- Higher profitability
- Higher sales
- Higher customer ratings
The days of viewing employee investment as optional are over.
To compete in the marketplace today requires managers to make employee culture a top priority.
Engaged = Motivated
While engagement is a massive topic with lots of potential strategies to try, at the heart of it is motivation. We have to understand what drives people.
Despite common use, money is a surprisingly poor motivator. It provides a momentary uptick on the timeline – a quick shot of dopamine – but then performance returns back to the previous level.
If we want long-term, sustained motivation, we need to look internally rather than externally.
Thankfully, the research on motivation is plentiful, and there are some real, concrete steps that managers can take to engage their teams.
One of those steps even comes in a handy formula.
Motivating Potential Score (MPS)
An important angle to consider when trying to understand motivation in the workplace is to focus on job characteristics. The way that we design jobs has a huge impact on the people working in them.
Unfortunately, many jobs are not so much designed as they are thrown together. They tend to be overloaded and unclear, with no real definition of success attached.
People don't hate work. They hate poorly designed work. Share on XBut a job that has been intentionally designed has the potential to radically increase motivation, satisfaction, and performance.
In 1975, two professors set out to discover exactly what this type of job would look like. They then turned their results into an equation (why not, right?) and called it the Motivating Potential Score (MPS).
Skill variety
In the assembly lines of the industrial age, jobs were becoming so narrow that you only needed to learn one skill. You’d sit at your workstation and perform the same three moves endlessly, all day.
A meaningful job, however, tends to include a variety of activities and requires people to learn multiple skills. If the skills are challenging to learn, all the better.
Task identity
Very simply, people like to finish what they start.
We can sometimes get carried away with specialization. We break apart a project into such small increments that no one really has ownership over the end product. You end up making photocopies all day and you’re not quite sure why.
In contrast to this, the ability to work on a project from design to completion is incredibly rewarding. Not only is it easier to keep the ultimate goal in front of us, but we can experience pride over a finished product. There is something very satisfying about being able to “close the loop” and identify a clear start and finish to our work.
Task significance
Sometimes, it’s really hard to see why our work matters. If we can give employees a clear line of sight between what they do and how that affects real people in some tangible way, we can tap into a much deeper well of motivation.
This is as much job design as it is casting vision. We need to help our employees envision the future and see how doing their work well will improve the quality of someone else’s life.
You can see that these first three characteristics are bundled together in the above formula. They can be collectively referred to as job meaningfulness. They are divided by 3 in order to find the average level of meaning that one might find in a job.
The fact that they’re bundled means that a drastic rise or lowering in one of the characteristics will certainly make a difference, but will not bottom out the final score. If task identity is low, for example, but you are able to use a variety of skills and see how your job affects others, the MPS may still be high.
These next two characteristics, however, have more potential to sway the overall level of motivation. Because they stand alone, a zero in either category will cause the entire score to fall through the floor.
Autonomy
This is all about freedom. This is about allowing the people who do the work to also have a say in how it is done. That means a manager, or an operations manual, isn’t dictating what they do every minute of the day.
It means increasing responsibility, letting them take calculated risks, and even learning to let them fail.
Autonomy doesn’t mean chaos, though. Your vision, values, and strategy provide critical boundaries that keep people aligned and moving in the same direction (hint: if you haven’t clarified these, too much autonomy could lead to a train wreck).
Autonomy isn’t set at the same level for each person, either. Not everyone gets to come out of the gate and work however they want. Generally, the more experience and expertise a person has, the more autonomy they can handle, while still performing with excellence. In other words, this may be a dial that you turn up slowly for a new hire with minimal experience.
The reason that autonomy is so motivating is that it allows us to increase our sense of competence and self-confidence in our work. This self-efficacy, the belief in our own ability to succeed, is not only motivating but is strongly correlated with increased performance.
There’s a cycle here. Greater autonomy leads to greater self-efficacy, which leads to greater performance, which then results in a higher level of trust, giving us the opportunity for even more autonomy, and so on.
Feedback
The final element is about how quickly and accurately you receive feedback on the quality of your work. When you hear the word “feedback,” I don’t want you to think about some quarterly performance review with your supervisor. This is not a subjective evaluation, but an awareness of the direct effect or consequence of your work.
In a technical setting, like construction, if you cut the board to the wrong length, this becomes apparent very quickly. No ambiguity. The feedback is rapid and precise.
In other settings, feedback is more ambiguous and revolves around factors like customer satisfaction. If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner, you still have a direct connection to the customer, but this can change pretty quickly as you grow. In a large organization, a worker can be buried so deep that they never have direct contact with the end-user, and they can lose the sense of how their work impacts another person. Some companies ask production workers to periodically spend a day answering phones in the customer service department in order to bridge this gap.
An absence of feedback feels like what you do doesn’t matter. If you mess up and no one notices or you can’t tell what effect it has, there isn’t really any motivation to try and improve what you do. Feedback conveys value.
Calculate Your Team’s Score
How does your job stack up as you read through these five characteristics?
How would the jobs of those on your team stack up?
To help you get a handle on what this looks like in your context, you can download a simple worksheet below. On it, you will make a list of each position you oversee and assign a rating to them based on their Motivating Potential Score. Then, identify one element that you could tweak in order to raise their score. You may decide that you need to find a way to increase feedback for one person while you begin to raise the autonomy for another.
Download the worksheet below to help you work through this for your team (or, better yet, with your team).
If we can learn to design jobs with these five characteristics in mind, not only can we improve performance, but people may actually like coming to work in the morning (now that’s a goal we should all be working towards).
Dan
Isn’t the rating from 1 to 7, i.e. you can’t have a rating of 0 on any of these or it would be totally meaningless, right? (from your text above: These next two characteristics, however, have more potential to sway the overall level of motivation. Because they stand alone, a zero in either category will cause the entire score to fall through the floor.
Touche, Donna. Touche.
Thank you
Thanks
thanks
My pleasure, Lesley!