Motivational managers are the key to addressing worker disengagement
According to Gallup’s “The State of the Global Workforce 2023 Report,” only 23 per cent of world employees were actively engaged at work in 2022.
While the pandemic brought us a fresh vocabulary of disengagement (think “Great Resignation” and “Quiet Quitting”), according to Derek Thompson from The Atlantic, the problem is not new. His analysis shows disengagement was there all along — all the way to 2000 and likely beyond.
With its new-found visibility, employee disengagement is reactivating attempts to correct it.
So how do we recover the $8.8 trillion in lost productivity the Gallup report says disgruntled and disengaged workers cost organizations globally? The same report recommends focusing on the most winnable employees and giving them better managers. Yet, as managers themselves seem to be actively disengaged, now may be a good time to stop and actively re-examine assumptions of what it takes to be engaged at work and in life.
How do we get engaged at work? In the same way that we get engaged in the rest of our lives — by following our interests. We don’t need to get paid to go fishing or play our favourite video game. We don’t need to get promoted to want to spend more time with people we love.
We will expend time, money, and energy to do so, and our cup of willpower will be fuller than before. Our motivational system, pulled by our unique potential, guides our attention to things we find interesting and that develop us. If we turn the dial of interest higher and higher, it will turn to passion, and then to love.
That’s hobbies and personal relationships, you may say, but that’s not work. Work is what we do to survive, pay bills and stay safe in this dangerous and unpredictable world. Across all socio-economic levels, work has become what we bear so we can enjoy the rest of our lives. No wonder the new generations are pushing back against the ever-expanding workdays that gobble up our chance at fulfilment and joy outside work.
Managers may have unconsciously
supported this world view for generations by trying to create engagement by bolstering employees’ safety and survival through money and promotions. They may have satiated their employees’ survival systems, expecting the efforts to activate employee interest and development. Didn’t Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, say that’s how motivation works?
Unfortunately, Maslow’s triangle of needs, whereby satisfying lowerlevel needs will eventually lead us to self-actualization, has long been debunked. Rather, we can think of human motivation as consisting of two independent and alternatively dominant motivational systems: those of survival and development. The primate survival wants (which make us desire to accumulate resources, defend territory, and rise in the hierarchy) and developmental wants (which pull us to grow through our unique interests) are often in conflict. We’ll accept less pay for work we find interesting. We’ll bear the boredom and routine of well-paid jobs.
Where does this leave managers? Understanding how the two motivational systems work inside employees (and themselves) will help them to know that keeping their employees engaged will require more than just providing them with pay raises and promotions. It will mean they may want to spend more
time and energy aligning the work with employees’ interests rather than their strengths. After all, we are interested in things we want to explore, which are not always the same things we already know well. It also means allowing for experimentation, job rotation, and active co-creation of work assignments that enrich and make jobs interesting.
Not all jobs can be interesting to those who do them all the time. Yet, even marginal increases in employee interest in work would yield a psychological and emotional engagement that has eluded organizations for a long time. We could continue seeing work as a survival game or see it as a new frontier of human development. If we were to invest thought and energy in helping employees activate their developmental system at work, it could change the very nature of work. Rather than a sentence we bear through, crossing off the days between vacations and holidays, work would allow us to create something that grows both us and the organization, and get something in return.