Motivating Knowledge Workers

David O'Donoghue at UXDX Community: Dublin. Video: https://youtu.be/g04QAvJPi5k

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Why a tech guy spent two years with psychologists

[00:00:16] Interesting me, I spent the last two years, over this year, locked up in a classroom with over 20 psychologists, studying. It was kind of interesting. That is something that I could never actually understand, that all these psychologists always thought it was really strange that there was a tech guy in the class. They just could never get that I would have an interest in this topic. They seemed to believe I should be studying computer science or data science or one of these topics, and I was always asked, why are you here anyway?

[00:01:05] I tried to explain to them what's quite simple, is for me this is a [?] that for some reason was kind of lost. But this is a topic that I've always been partial to, and I think maybe it comes from a background playing sports, where this is not really an unusual concept. People think people playing in a team will have a certain level of talent, maybe an extreme level of talent, but there are other factors, that when you play a game or whatever, apparently an individual's performance isn't necessarily just going to be their level of talent [?].

[00:01:53] So I'm really excited, and that's really what this talk is a bit of, just trying to share the outcome of the research last year. I hope there are some things in there for you to consider as a leader in motivating your people, or maybe considering the kind of environments and organization that you should be looking for.

Setting the context: work motivation, knowledge workers, modern organizations

[00:02:24] Okay, so, motivating knowledge workers research. Let's just set some context around what I'm talking about here. So first of all, work motivation. This is the official organizational behavior definition, and it means any force that initiates work-related behavior and determines its form, intensity and direction. Okay, so whatever behavior that has, form, intensity and direction, and that's what we mean by motivation.

[00:03:04] And I referenced modern workforce, I referenced knowledge workers, so what do we mean there? This is for example, and I'm going to take a guess that pretty much everybody in this room could be considered to be a knowledge worker. We are people who think for a living. Specifically, when I explain this I always think of my father. My father was a baker, and doing that kind of manual work [?] he didn't really need to think, he just needed to do. I think in general, people in our industry, it's the other way around. We have skills, you do need to do, but the most critical thing that we do is think. And we're normally dealing with complexity, we're normally solving problems, we're normally being creative. There's a fundamental difference from that perspective in terms of motivating that type of individual compared to how you would have motivated 30, 40 years ago.

[00:04:12] And then modern organizations. The context here again I think is relevant, and what the research most definitely really focused on. The type of organization that maybe my father would have walked into, where maybe there were a hundred, 200, 300 employees who primarily were manual workers.

[00:04:45] If you look at a modern organization, whether you're talking about Zalando or we're talking about your organizations, again I'm going to hazard a guess that this is common across all of our organizations, and this complexity, there is an inherent complexity in our job, and people within the organization are required to be creative, innovative and problem-solve. Most importantly, normally there's a significant amount of change in organizations today. Modern organizations operate at pace.

[00:05:17] I would have said that four years ago, that was true. I'd have said it three years ago, and I'm going to say to you, more today than there ever was. It's just getting quicker and quicker, it's more demanding, and the pace that we're being asked to work at just seems to be increasing. Are you sure that's a good thing? But that's just the reality of the situation.

[00:05:44] Because of this, our organizations, compared to more traditional organizations, expect some behaviors from people, and they expect us to be adaptive and proactive. So what that means is, when stuff happens and we need to react to it, unlike in the old days where we'd just send that issue upstairs to the boss and those guys can make a decision, and when they've made the decision they can inform us, and then my boss can figure out how he or she will react, and then once he tells me what to do, probably some time later, I go and do that. Our jobs are just not like that right now. We're expected, at the coalface, when we see an issue, we're expected to start this process of problem solving and dealing with the issues that are there. So adaptive and proactive behaviors are really key requirements of all knowledge workers working in modern organizations.

The science: three basic psychological needs

[00:06:47] So just to give you, if that's the context, before I get into the research, I do want to take maybe five to 10 minutes just to give you some of the background on some of the science behind human motivation, and I guess some of the things that I studied over the last two years. I'm not too sure if I knew this two years ago.

[00:07:09] So, human motivation. For me the interesting thing about this is that we are all born to be curious and proactive. This is not an evolved behavior, this is something that exists within our DNA. So Rory was talking about evolution earlier, so it's the very same principles at play here. And specifically, what underlies motivation are what are treated as basic psychological needs. From an organizational behavior perspective the word basic carries a lot of meaning. Again, this means it's not an evolved behavior, it's not a learned behavior, it's an evolved behavior [?]. So this exists within each and every one of us.

[00:08:03] The first of the three needs is something called competence. Again, think about this from a survival perspective, and it's critical. When we were born, you have a drive in you to master your environment. Think about a baby developing. You needed to get up and crawl and start moving, or just moving at times, to develop dexterity and the motor skills that that baby is going to need, and nobody coaches a child how to do that. It's just an inbuilt driver in a child. That's an example from our early days, but this applies at work as well. If we feel competent, or if we feel like we have the ability to develop competence to do the job, we feel good about the job, and if we don't have competence, or if we fail to believe that we can develop that competence, then we're not going to feel good [?].

[00:09:10] The second of the three needs is relatedness. Again, this is a very deep-seated trait. All of us are social animals, humans, and we do have this drive in us to form groups, to form societies, to form communities, to act together. If we didn't have this, I mean, just think, would there be societies, would we have cities? It's absolutely fundamental to who we are. As a consequence of this we do also have a desire, and again think about it from a newborn perspective, you have this dependency on your parents and your family and those caregivers, those people that are around you. It's absolutely critical from a survival perspective that you have that desire to be part of that group.

[00:10:02] Again this is something that stays with us through our lives, and we do care what other people think. Regardless of what we say, we do care what other people think, and we do like to make a positive impression on others. So these issues exist in work obviously. We do have a desire to be part of the group, we do have a desire to be part of the team, and it's really critical to us and our own personal well-being that we satisfy a need to be part of the group.

[00:10:35] The third psychological need is autonomy, and this one causes a lot of confusion, in actual fact. Let's clarify this one straight away. People typically take this to mean independence. I'm autonomous, free and independent from everybody and everything else. We've had a lot of fun with this one and we've seen a lot of poor behaviors around this, as people take it to mean independence, I'm free and independent from the organization, I can do what I want. Clearly, from an organizational perspective, it may not be. But from the science perspective it doesn't mean that either. What this means is experiencing choice, basically. And if this meant independence, clearly we would have a big contradiction there as well, in terms of relatedness and independence. So it doesn't mean independence, it means experiencing choice.

[00:11:41] Again, you can take it back to your younger years, probably when you were a teenager and you get to that certain age where it starts to bother you that your parents are making all the big decisions for you, and you probably reacted quite negatively to that. It's not that you want to be independent, you still want to be part of the family and that's a critical relationship in your life, but you certainly do want to be in control of the big decisions and the choices that relate to you and your future and so on and so forth. So autonomy means experiencing choice, and not necessarily independence.

The environment decides whether those needs get met

[00:12:21] I think really the biggest takeaway from this is the fact that these are basic psychological needs. This is inherent in all of us. Sometimes you get people, they develop an understanding of, well, that sounds like a kind of Western, maybe American idea. Maybe in Western Europe and Eastern Europe the cultures are kind of different, and maybe the cultures are different, people would look at it this way. Not true. There's over 40 years' worth of science that verifies this. So what that means is, it doesn't matter where you come from, where you exist on the planet, who you are, what your background is or what your experiences are, each and every one of us has these three basic psychological needs, and when these are satisfied it has a really positive effect.

[00:13:16] The really obvious question then is, okay, if we all have this, should we all be really motivated? That seems kind of strange, because even if we look at ourselves we realize that there are times we are motivated and there are times we're not. So obviously, yes, there are other factors at play here, and probably the biggest factor of all is the actual environment that you exist in. That's probably true for every evolved behavior. The environment around you is going to have the biggest impact on our experience.

[00:13:56] Think about a plant. The plant is inherently built to turn from seed and grow and blossom and produce flowers, pollen and so on and so forth. The thing is though, the plant is completely dependent on the surrounding environment, on the nutrients that it provides. In that way people are like the plants. If we receive water and sunshine we will grow and flourish, and if we satisfy the three basic psychological needs, our nutrients, we will grow and flourish. But just like a plant, if we're in an environment that doesn't satisfy those three basic psychological needs, we won't [?].

Controlled motivation versus autonomous motivation

[00:14:47] Okay, so specifically, what we're talking about here is work motivation. So when it comes to work motivation, obviously the most critical environment we can talk about is the work environment itself. When it comes to work motivation, and in actual fact human motivation, there are actually five different flavors of motivation that people can experience, and I don't really want to go into that, so we're going to bring that up a level. What that means is that we're going to talk about a superset, basically, of a few more motivations. You may have come across some of these concepts.

[00:15:38] The first one is something called controlled motivation, and this really means that there's an external entity, something external to us, that is trying to control us and trying to motivate us. Normally that's going to be the promise of rewards, of a gold star, a financial reward, and maybe even the concept of punishment [?]. It's important, because you can also achieve controlled motivation that way, so it doesn't even necessarily need to be a positive concept. But either way, I, as the leader of this organization, am looking to control my people by promising a financial reward or some kind of gold stars.

[00:16:35] The other form of motivation is something called autonomous motivation. Now this is different because it comes from within the individual, and it's easy to visualize this from yourself. Again, a consequence of the type of jobs we do, probably we're in the jobs we do because we at least have a certain amount of interest in the things that we do. So whether it's software development, what about UX, or what about data science, you probably have at least a base level of passion that's inherent within you for that particular topic, and that's probably a good example of autonomous motivation.

[00:17:17] These things are experienced differently as an individual. When you have controlled motivation, I feel like I'm doing something because I have to do it. Again, think about that. I'm threatening you with a punishment, I am promising you a reward of some kind, and so you decide, okay, I'd better do this, I'm going to get in trouble if I don't do it, or, look, I'm going to get a bonus, it's probably going to be rewarded. So it's not necessarily a bad thing and it can be effective, it will generate motivation to do an activity.

[00:17:55] The thing is though, and again I'm talking about the science, over 40 years' worth of science shows that autonomous motivation is significantly better when it comes to doing work that calls for problem solving, creativity or innovation. In other words, the type of work that we do. So given that, it's kind of clear that for our organizations and those leaders of these organizations, we've got to be aiming for autonomous motivation.

Intrinsic versus identified motivation

[00:18:33] So let's just take a slightly deeper look at that again. I mentioned at the start that there were five different flavors of human motivation, and controlled and autonomous are just kind of supersets of some of those flavors. So let's just take a closer look at autonomous motivation. There are two different types of motivation within autonomous motivation. It's worth going into this detail because, again, I believe a lot of the mistakes we made in Zalando around a lot of the things we were implementing around autonomy were for these reasons, and let me try and explain.

[00:19:13] The first kind is intrinsic motivation. Again, this is probably a term people have heard of, people are aware of, and in actual fact, when I gave the description of autonomous motivation you were probably replacing one with the other. But that's okay, it's definitely a form of autonomous motivation. Again, this is something that comes from within you.

[00:19:36] I got into writing software because I really, really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the process of having a problem, having to take a little bit of code, you have some issues, you don't know what's going wrong, you go through this kind of problem solving, and then you get that eureka moment, and then you run the software and this thing that you visualized is now a reality in front of you. For me that was a fantastic process. It's a great way to earn a living, I'd say. I was very, very passionate about that, I had a level of intrinsic motivation.

[00:20:24] However, there is another form of autonomous motivation. This is something called identified motivation. With intrinsic motivation it's internal, it comes from within you, but identified motivation is kind of interesting here, from a work motivation perspective, because it can come from an external factor. We did talk about this earlier with controlled motivation, but this is an external motivator that doesn't have the same problems [?].

[00:21:01] Let me try and explain the difference between the two of them here. Intrinsic motivation is based on things you enjoy. Think about the things that you enjoy doing, or that you find interesting. And that's kind of the problem then from a work motivation perspective. I enjoy a lot of what I do, I find a lot of what I do interesting, but not everything I do is enjoyable, and not everything I do is interesting. So in other words, in a work environment, intrinsic motivation will only get you so far. There are a lot of things we have to do at work that are just not inherently interesting and enjoyable.

[00:21:42] This is the mistake people make, and their organizations make, because they set up initiatives based on intrinsic motivation, based on trying to generate motivation within you. But that's not possible, it has to come from within you, it can't come from me. And not only that, there's a real danger here, because if you have intrinsic motivation for something and I start trying to mess with that, typically what happens is I actually undermine your intrinsic motivation. So I would make the argument that you should think of intrinsic motivation the way you think of your hobbies.

[00:22:24] For me, a really good example here: I started playing golf, I took it up last year, and I've always loved sports and I'm just too old now for the more contact sports [?], so I'm playing golf. And I'm really not very good, actually I'm really terrible, and I actually can't explain it. I play a round, typically I come off the course, I'm frustrated and I can't understand how I'm blowing it, as bad as I am, and I feel like breaking a couple of clubs, that cost money, and I get in the car and I drive home. But before I get home I kind of want to go again, and I can't explain that to you. But I have some deep sense, from a competence perspective, that I'm going to get better. And I play with my two sons, and we have a great bit of banter when we play, so there's that relatedness thing. And I definitely have choice, no one is forcing me to go, I want to go.

[00:23:23] So every weekend when I get in the car and head off to the golf course, I have a level of excitement that's kind of like a kid on Christmas morning. Maybe not quite as much as that, but I'm definitely excited, and that's a really positive thing to have in your life. But I'm definitely experiencing intrinsic motivation towards golf. You'll experience that at work sometimes, but not all the time.

[00:23:46] Identified motivation, a great example of this is my wife. My wife is a nurse, and we've been going out together since we were kids, basically, and I remember long before we married she was training as a nurse. We were going out, she was living in the hospital at the time, I asked her how her day went and she was really excited, she was really, really bubbling with excitement. And I said, hello, what happened today, clearly something really important happened. She explained to me how she gave this woman a bed bath and fixed her and changed her, and she was really proud of that.

[00:24:27] Now I couldn't understand it, just for me personally I just couldn't imagine not only doing it, but of course I didn't understand that. This kind of stuck in my head. I was kind of a bit bothered by it, but I didn't really understand it. But of course this is what it was, because it comes from, she wanted to be a nurse ever since she was a little girl. That's all she ever wanted to do, she went to school, she studied hard, all she ever wanted to be was a nurse. And this act of caring for this lady who was incapable of caring for herself, and even though this lady couldn't talk, she wasn't able to speak, it didn't bother my wife, she didn't need that. So what she was getting was a sense of importance from the job that she was doing, that was completely aligned with her own set of values and her own set of goals. And so that's identified motivation, and that's the distinction between the two.

Internalization, and what leaders should aim for

[00:25:30] Okay, so from a work perspective, if you've got individuals that have intrinsic motivation, that's fantastic, but really don't try to mess with it, because there's nothing you can do to generate it, but it's very easy to diminish it. So just support it. From a work perspective, what you should be trying to do is focus on this concept of identified motivation, where you're helping people see how important the work is, and you're helping to align that work with people's sense of value and their own goals.

[00:26:06] Something kind of magical happens when you do that. It's called internalization. So although this is an external motivator coming from the business, people internalize the concept and they experience identified motivation in exactly the same way as they experience intrinsic motivation. So this is what you should be aiming for. Don't undermine the intrinsic motivation that exists, and try to generate identified motivation. The science again, there's over 40 years of research that shows this, when you achieve this, this is where you get enhanced performance.

The research at Zalando, and empowering leadership

[00:26:47] So let's just look a little bit then, if that's the science and some of the background, let's look at a little bit of the research. Clearly autonomous motivation, for people that need to be creative, people that need to be innovative, or people that deal with complexity and solve problems for a living and think for a living, autonomous motivation is what we need to achieve for these people. So the obvious question is, how do you create autonomous motivation with people? Well, guess what, by explaining the three psychological needs and satisfying those critical needs.

[00:27:26] So all the science that exists suggests that if you satisfy the three psychological needs, competence, relatedness and autonomy, you generate autonomous motivation in people. Now, I keep saying there's like over 40 years of science that says this, so why did I have to do any research on this, we already know? That's a good question. There's a lot of research out there that says this, but as far as we can tell, my research has never been done in a high-tech organization such as Zalando, across multiple job domains. So from an academic perspective that was an item of interest: does this hold true in an organization for people in those types of jobs that we do? Okay, great, it did [?].

[00:28:19] So how do we do that, exactly? I kind of made a statement earlier that the environment was probably the biggest factor here. So when it comes to the work environment, and again, we had a lot of initiatives around autonomy in the tech teams, I observed a lot of really kind of interesting, I thought, poor behaviors, or maybe mistakes that we had made. You would see a lot of people who are in leadership positions now, stepping back, because, well, it's the team's autonomy, if I kind of interfered I would be messing with their autonomy.

[00:28:59] My sense of this is that leadership is actually really important here, and not just any form of leadership. So what I mean by that, obviously I could be a director, and I could command, I could tell you guys what I need you to do, when I need you to do it and how I need you to do it, and that's probably not going to satisfy you. So it's not just that leadership was important, but it's the style of leadership. And so we looked at empowering leadership.

[00:29:34] By empowering leadership we mean the leader offers choices to people, offers coaching, reflects information and context around the work that we're doing, understands the staff perspective. You may not find it interesting, you may not really like what we're doing, and listening to people when they have those issues is important, and encouraging self-initiation. Okay, so that was kind of the hypothesis.