I read somewhere that Generation Y wants to do meaningful work and then I wondered: Who doesn’t? Don’t we all want to contribute to something bigger, know why we do the work we do? Dan Ariely confirms my feelings in his book “The Upside of Irrationality”. It is his second book about our irrational behavior - his first book was titled “Predictably Irrational”, which I highly recommend to read. Ariely is a behavioral economist who carries out a lot of experiments, usually among MIT students. In this book many experiments are related to work, which is a topic I’m interested in (in case you haven’t noticed). He carries out a few experiments about being motivated to do meaningful work or the opposite, losing motivation when the work is not meaningful. If the work of the students is destroyed in the experiment, they work less hard and are less motivated. This sounds obvious because it is so clear, but there are in the workplace less obvious examples that still can be very demotivating.
I had to think about a “Jurisdictional scan” that I had to write in my former job at one of the Ontario Ministries. It’s one of those documents that take a lot of time and I was very sure that it was useless and would only end up in a drawer (or as file in the document management system). Senior staff refuses to write jurisdictional scans and that’s why a contractor, like me, had to do it. I asked questions, but nobody knew the answer. The goal was not clear, the topic too broad, the target group unknown, the reason for the selected jurisdictions arbitrary. Besides, all content would be timely, so a year later someone (not me!) would have to do it all over again. So from the beginning on it was clear this was a waste of time, or better: meaningless work. Because I was sure that nobody would read it, I added a comment in the document that “who reads this, can claim a chocolate bar”. Not one chocolate bar was claimed. I don’t need to add how motivated I was to work on this document.
Sometimes the work becomes meaningless because of circumstances. In another job (not at the government), I worked as consultant/researcher and I knew that sometimes a recommendation would never lead to a change. It didn’t discourage me, maybe because I had already started a new challenging project. One time we were investigating how to solve the (future) loss of knowledge for a company with many people close to the age of retirement. Halfway the project however, the company had to “let go” many people, which was another type of knowledge loss. It didn’t help us, people were hesitant to collaborate – if we’re assessing their knowledge, they could be next. The initial question became less urgent for the company management. To say that the project became meaningless is a big statement, but there were clearly other priorities and I wonder how much of what we developed is implemented.
Contributing to the bigger picture is not always so obvious. I don’t build a Blackberry or design the newest applications. Still I have the feeling that I contribute, that my work is a small piece in the big puzzle. Ariely agrees that people are motivated if they have the feeling that what they do is useful, has a meaning. “If you’re a manager who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts. On the other hand, if you want to motivate people working with you and for you, it would be useful to pay attention to them, their effort, and the fruits of their labor.” Show or say that you value the work. You may earn a chocolate bar if you do.