Something Worth Getting up For!
By Graham Mills de Pledge, Associate Trainer CIPD
Managers and Team Leaders today face a difficult task in keeping up the morale and motivation of their staff. Many staff have already completed difficult journeys into work by road or public transport and have left home early to arrive for work at 8.30.
Workloads and demands on the individual’s time at work can also increase pressure and reduce energy and enthusiasm still further! Monetary rewards are often outside the span of the managers’ control or remain capped or limited from directives above them.
So what can the Manager or Team Leader do?
This short article considers how on at least one day a week a manager can use delegation as an effective motivational tool so that their workers can come to work with the idea that at least today will be different..”Something worth getting up for!”
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The job advert promises a unique opportunity to make a difference, a challenge, excitement and variety. This coupled with an attractive salary are the words that encourage applicants to seek job opportunities and a possible change of employer. These expectations are further elevated at interview where development and career opportunity are discussed and hinted at with the usual question “So, where do you see yourself in 5 years time?”
The new employee promises energy, drive, enthusiasm and commitment and all seems well.
Having facilitated training with groups at all levels in the past 15 years expectations are confirmed in the question “What are the 3 reasons you chose to work at your current organisation?” The most common answers will surprise no-one:
• Salary and Benefits
• Challenge
• A worthwhile job - achievement
• A chance to make a difference
• Job satisfaction
• Variety
• Career progression
• Personal development
• Social – a sense of belonging
It would appear then that not much has changed in motivation factors over the past 30 odd years and yet exit interviews and discussions with staff on courses indicate that all the knowledge of what motivates has been consistent during this time, the skill of using that knowledge for managers and team leaders seems to be open to question.
Research conducted with work groups suggest that during the initial induction and training periods learning new things is interesting, challenging and provides the individual with a sense of achievement. However, once the job has been learnt and eventually mastered, the law of diminishing returns means that the sense of achievement and satisfaction is slowly eroded away. Indeed, one delegate referred to her current job as “Like an episode of a favourite soap, you can miss it for weeks but when you return the storyline is exactly the same!” Using this analogy to her own work where she admitted on return from a recent 3 week break “Nothing was different there was just more of it!”
The Expectancy Theory of motivation concludes that the effort put into a job must be at least worth the reward, and yet many of the individuals I have spoken with admit to being “a little bored or stale” as the challenge has all but disappeared.
Indeed research has pointed to the fact that more mistakes are made when people are bored than when they are busy. And does the increase in one-day absences also point to a lack of motivation to turn in?
Staff also discussed that the personal development plans that were agreed at appraisals were often not completed or in the worse cases even started! Thus the value of the appraisal exercise was called into question.
When asked “why don’t they do something about it?” a majority of staff admitted to be in a state of “conforming” They were at work because they had bills to pay and were “just getting by.”
When asked further what they would like to see happen, as well as the expected “to be paid more” or “promotion” many accepted that today with the de-layering of Companies, the chances of promotion had been reduced and they also accepted that “pay increases and bonuses” as a method of long term motivation was not the answer! “The motivation lasts until I have spent it and that is not long!”
So what else would they like to see to keep them enthusiastic and motivated?
Once again the answers are not rocket science:
• Learn something new
• Give me more responsibility
• A bit of variety
• Cross training
• Personal Development opportunities
Given this background of disappointment and to track back to the original question:
So what can the Manager or Team Leader do?
In understanding the current pressures on managers and team leaders for achievement of the task, the delegates were quick not to apportion all the blame on their Leaders as they accept that increased workloads and therefore time pressures were a major cause of things not happening. They also readily accept that they “Would still have to do the day job” as well as take on these new opportunities highlighted above.
It seems that some of the answer in part lies in planning time for and implementing a programme of effective delegation.
By effective delegation, I am not referring to the delegation dump of a menial task to remove it from our desks onto somebody else, or simply job passing because you know the other person can do it, but effective delegation in its motivational sense with a sense of challenge and stretch for the individual.
In our busy work environments we seem to have forgotten that delegation in its truest sense was given as a reward for good performance, something extra in recognition of the day job well done!
How do we plan time for delegation? The answer lies first with the manager or team leaders’ ability to create what we will refer to for want of a better term “a bucket of time” at the very bottom, by indentifying, stopping or changing the amount of time spent on Low Value Activities. The challenge is to try and create 2 hours of free time that was previously filled by these low value adding tasks. (See example below.)
Manager time – Full___________
Team Leader time – Full___________
Staff Time – Full __________
Latest Entrant – Full ___________
Bucket of free time = 2 Hours
Once low value time has been identified and freed up,(the changing from weekly to bi-weekly team meetings for instance can free up this time in one hit without too much disruption to working practices and processes.)
The next step is not to allow the bucket to fill up with more low value activity but to ensure that it is filled up with some aspect of the job next above or an aspect of cross training with jobs on a similar level for instance. In the ideal example we can start a top/down programme of delegation of tasks which will provide the individual with a fresh challenge, a sense of development and growth and satisfaction, the very things they were looking for from the organisation in the first instance of joining. It will also provide the added value to the business of a natural process of cross training, personal development and even in the longer term an effective system for succession planning!
The tough challenge is ensuring that this weekly or bi-weekly 2 hour spot is planned and prioritised as high value time which should only be surrendered if there are no viable alternatives.
Whilst the author accepts from his previous managerial experiences that there are other contributory factors to motivation such as pay and benefits, work/life balance initiatives and that the challenge of creating this bucket of time is easier said than done, I will conclude with a comment which spurred me on to consider the problem and indeed to write this article:
“My week is fairly predictable, similar patterns for travel, arrival at work and in-tray, at least with this idea, I would have one day which would be different and worth looking forward to” “It would for me at least be one day in the week that would be worth getting up for.”
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London, May 2008 | 
