Written by Caroline Boyd, Senior Performance Consultant at Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?.
A New year brings a fresh start and new energy to refocus and reprioritise. It’s a golden opportunity to pause and ask ourselves whether the people in our teams really understand the part they play in the overall aims of the business and why they matter.
Are you clear on what exactly you’re trying to do as a business? On what the overall goal is that brings the organisation together and acts as the inspiration for everything individuals do, regardless of where they sit? Is every individual clear on the part they play in this? If not, what needs to happen?
The latest Gallup State of The Global Workplace survey reveals the rather disturbing statistic that 60% of people in work are emotionally detached and even worse than that, 19% are miserable and actively disengaged. When we link this data to the fact that most of us spend 81,396 hours of our lives working, the implication is alarming.
- How productive or committed are individuals likely to be if they are actively disengaged?
- What’s the knock-on effect on those around them?
At any time within our work, we unconsciously question: “is it worthwhile for me to fully engage at this moment?”. One of the key areas we use to answer this question is “does this work hold meaning for me?”. A huge part of meaning within work is the context, “why am I doing what I’m doing?”.
In Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics Dan Ariely’s famous 2013 TED talk, he neatly describes an experiment he and his research colleagues performed to investigate productivity at work.
Two groups of randomly chosen individuals were enrolled to build simple Lego robots in exchange for a few dollars for each one completed.
The Lego robots built by Group 1 (the meaningful condition) were carefully placed under the researcher’s table and the participants were then sent to build the next one.
The Lego robots built by Group 2 (the meaningless condition) were dismantled in front of the participants as each one was presented to the researcher, with the Lego given back to the individual to build the next one.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Group 1 participants built on average 11 robots whilst group 2 averaged just 7.
Productivity suffered significantly.
Seeing their work dismantled in front of them hit the participants hard. It may well have been a mildly intriguing research experiment, but they took it seriously! This was true even when the individual’s love of Lego building was factored in – it seemed that the removal of even a small amount of meaning also removed the inherent joy.
What does this tell us and why is it so relevant now?
We give work our all when we care about it. We care about the challenge, we care about creating something, we care about being part of something bigger than us.
Yet how often:
- Does our work feel futile?
- Do we spend hours on a project or presentation that never goes anywhere or is never used?
- Are our efforts not acknowledged?
- Are our own Lego robots dismantled right in front of us?
For our Co-Founder Ben Hunt-Davis’s Olympic Gold-medal winning GB rowing crew, they asked themselves the famous question “will it make the boat go faster?”. If it didn’t, they didn’t do it. They ensured that every action, conversation and interaction helped them progress their big picture goal. By building strong links between their everyday actions and their purpose, their ‘work’ (training, team, technique) became meaningful. Instead of futility, every action in the day-to-day had purpose, adding boatspeed for them as a team.
The last few years have seen an even greater need for companies to focus on the things that really matter, to prioritise ruthlessly and to find ways to keep businesses running.
The downside of this has been that many individuals have seen their connection with the bigger picture weakened, their everyday activities overloaded and their affinity with their colleagues diluted.
So, what can we as leaders do to amplify meaning?
- The big picture matters. Explicitly reconnect your team to their part in the broader goals of the organisation. Help individuals recognise how their day-to-day work is making a difference overall.
- Progress matters. Find ways to recognise and mark the progress that individuals are making on a day-to-day basis. Use check-ins to highlight achievements no matter how small and review goals to ensure they remain relevant. Gather evidence to demonstrate that everyone is on track.
- Connection matters. Reinforce the sense of belonging within the team, demonstrate the role that each person plays in the broader success of the team. Find opportunities for team mates to work together and grab every opportunity for conversations within the team that go beyond day-to-day tasks.
It may well be uncomfortable but ask yourself:
How much of what you are asking your team to do might feel futile to them right now and what can you do to help them rediscover a sense of meaning?
What is your equivalent of the Olympic Gold Medal and why does every individual matter in achieving it? Have you told them? Have you given them time and space to understand it for themselves?
