Good Work and Performance Culture
“Good Work is about realising both the individual and the collective growth potential in your organisation. The outcome is simple: sustainable, high-performance culture.”
High-performing organisations are made up of highly-motivated people in strong, cohesive teams. Too often, leaders see these as the same thing because both are orientated towards growth. They are connected, but they are not the same and they have different drivers. When these characteristics are allowed to thrive, people love what they do and perform at their best. We call it Good Work.
If you’re interested in working with us, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Introducing Good Work
The tendency to combine motivation and team cohesion under a broad ‘engagement’ banner leads organisations to focus on one area while failing to recognise the importance of the other. Of course, some organisations appreciate both, but the initiatives are usually carried out by separate functions that often do not communicate well. It might be a HR team trying to create a more inclusive environment, to encourage better teamwork, while the management of a front-line sales team is trying to motivate staff to generate more leads. If the motivational drive is focused on creating a highly competitive environment, it may undermine the inclusion initiative (or vice versa).
Bringing together the concepts of motivation and collective growth gives us a holistic view of an organisation’s performance culture. Digging deeper into the specific drivers of these two behavioural pillars allows us to see whether specific actions are productive or damaging to that culture. Organisations that can raise levels of both individual motivation and team cohesion will outperform those that don’t.
However, insights are just a first step. The hard part comes when you decide to do something about the data, and turn the numbers into an action plan. This is where MoreThanNow can help your organisation. Intrigued? Then keep on reading to discover how behavioural science can inform your team’s development.
Motivated People
+ Collective Growth
= Performance Culture
The Science behind Good Work
We use an adapted version of Amy Edmondson’s psychological safety [1] framework to measure team cohesion and collective growth, and we use Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self Determination Theory[2] as the basis for our work on motivation. Psychological Safety is primarily concerned with how we act and communicate within a group or organisation. It has been shown to reduce risk, enhance learning and boost organisational performance. Self Determination Theory is concerned with the intrinsic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and belonging.
The Four Types of Organisation or Team
When we combine the dynamics of motivation and collective growth, we can see four cultural types:
Performance Zone - This is where you want to be - Highly motivated people working in strongly cohesive teams manage risk well. They are resilient, learning orientated, adaptable and innovative.
Comfort Zone - When people work in cohesive teams but lack individual motivation, they are in the comfort zone. This is OK for a short time, particularly when there is uncertainty in the business environment. Comfortable organisations are generally low risk, but complacency becomes a problem, particularly when there is low competition in the market place. Teams in the comfort zone will not grow; they are not adaptable or innovative and this is not healthy in the long term.
Dysfunction Zone - This is where we find highly motivated but disconnected teams: The focus here is on individual rather than organisational returns. Dysfunctional teams do not benefit from collective intelligence or cognitive diversity. These organisations may perform well in the short-term, but they are vulnerable to uncertainty and change and highly exposed to operational, reputational and compliance risk.
Failure Zone - Then there are organisations that are disconnected and unmotivated. There’s no need to go into too much explanation here, but this requires urgent attention. Individual teams or functions in this type should also be given immediate leadership and HR support.
Successful organisations are constantly striving to move towards the Growth Zone…
Moving towards Performance Culture
Our approach at MoreThanNow is to identify where an organisation or function sits within this framework, and help them make progress towards where they want to be. This entails understanding the underlying factors that build bonds and create a productive working environment, as well as those which motivate individuals, groups, and teams. As with all behavioural analysis, context is everything. What engages or motivates one person or group of people may be ineffective or even counterproductive for another. Here, the distinction between teams and groups is a vital one. A team is synthetically created by an organisation. A group is determined by some common feature: This might be demographic groups such as gender, age, ethnicity, socio-economic background, or common interest groups that have evolved. A team may contain individuals from a wide variety of groups and a group may contain members of several teams.
“What engages one group may be ineffective or even counterproductive for another. ”
There is plenty of evidence that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones, but that only holds true when the full cognitive diversity of the members is mobilised. In order to ensure this inclusivity, it is vital that we understand the source of any lack of cohesion or motivation. We must ascertain whether it is a function of the team’s management, it’s structure or perhaps a factor that is outside the control of the team and its leaders. The MoreThanNow approach allows us to identify not just the behavioural strengths and weaknesses of teams within an organisation, but also the source of any imbalances.
Building Resilience
Our framework also allows us to look at how organisations react to external shocks. This could be economic or political uncertainty, an event like the current COVID-19 crisis or perhaps a shifting operational environment. The recent events have demonstrated this particularly well. It would be easy to conclude that the lockdown period enforced by the coronavirus would induce a sense of detachment or isolation in employees and reduce motivation; relatedness or belonging is one of the core pillars of SDT motivation[3]. We recently conducted a diagnostic survey on 250 workers from a variety of organisations, to test this.
“Our framework allows us to look at how people react to external shocks like Covid-19”
On the surface, the findings were unremarkable. Unsurprisingly, overall motivation scores were down a little, relative to pre-crisis levels. But as we dug deeper, we found some important differentials. We found that the motivational pillar most impacted by the change to the working environment was not relatedness or belonging, but autonomy. We were also able to ascertain that poor communication was the main cause of this. Managers were seen to be remote, handing out orders to be followed, rather than involving employees in the discussion. Moreover, employees no longer felt they had a forum to express ideas, and this is what led to decreased motivation.
Of course, the sense of belonging was impacted, but not in an obvious way. The overall levels did not really decline. There was a strong decline among young males, which is not surprising, because they are often the group most likely to engage in activities that involved physical presence, such as socialising after work. However, the effect was offset by a higher sense of belonging among other, mainly older, groups who perhaps felt that the more regular video conferences offered them a better medium to communicate with a wider audience than they might have previously been able to do.
Turning Insights into Action
These insights allow us to prescribe targeted interventions that work. In the example above, it would be easy for an organisation, fearing a remote-working induced drop in motivation, to focus on the idea of relatedness and to attempt to remedy it with virtual social gatherings, Zoom cocktails or whatever is the latest fad. However, these would likely have limited impact on people’s fundamental sense of motivation. The younger crowd may not see this as a substitute for the real thing, while the older crowd might get just as much of a boost to their sense of relatedness or belonging from a work-based team call as they do from something framed in a social context. Meanwhile their collective sense of autonomy continues to decline, and with it, their levels of motivation.
“These insights allow us to prescribe targeted interventions that work.”
In this case, our intervention would focus on simple tools to allow employees to engage in how their near-term goals are adapted to the day to day needs of running the business remotely. We could introduce measures that give people more input into how they go about doing their job. We might focus on manger messaging, as this was shown to be a key driver of the sense of autonomy. And we could introduce initiatives that allow employees to share ideas for how to improve processes going forwards.
Of course, every organisation is different, and every situation has its own context. Ask us how to accelerate your journey towards Good Work.
Read More about Good Work
References
[1] Edmondson describes psychological safety as “a climate where people feel safe enough to take interpersonal risks by speaking up and sharing concerns, questions or ideas”. Psychological safety is not about being nice, nor is it about lowering performance standards. It is about building an environment in which people are empowered to innovate and to strive for higher performance while being more sustainable owing to a lack of fear over expressing alternative views or raising concerns.
[2] Ryan and Deci define Self Determination Theory (SDT) as “an approach to human motivation and personality that…highlights the importance of humans' evolved inner resources. Its arena is the investigation of people's inherent growth tendencies and innate psychological needs… as well as [for] the conditions that foster those positive processes.
[3] The three pillars of Ryan and Deci’s Self Determination Theory of motivation are Autonomy, Relatedness and Competence.