Motivation for Engineering Organisations
Are you trying to land someone on the moon or build a pyramid?
Understanding how people in your team or organisation are motivated is important and the traditional mechanisms for motivating people don’t well as we think they do. My rough rule of thumb is that if you can effectively motivate people then not only are they upwards of 3 times more effective in their jobs but they are able to tackle the hard problems that matter. As I’m also tremendously lazy, I can also confirm that highly motivated people require significantly less oversight day to day. If you’re a leader wanting headspace to think then figuring out motivation is one of the big levers to pull on.
There are two types of motivation — intrinsic and extrinsic. Between them, there’s a spectrum of human motivation from extrinsic where motivation comes from the outside to intrinsic where the motivation comes from within. This might take the form of a reward whether it’s in the present or the future to meet our needs.
Salary or bonus is a form of extrinsic motivation. Or it might be based upon fear of a set of consequences — for example, losing your job or being shouted at. As an organisation building something; you need to make a conscious choice as to what kind of organisation you want to be and it depends on what you’re building.
If you’re looking to build a pyramid then extrinsic motivation is the tool of choice for most of your workforce. Nothing says it’s time to work hard more than the prospect of being beaten to death if you are perceived as slacking off. Other than a select few people directing proceedings then the majority of your workforce is going to be subject to a harsh version of extrinsic motivation. And, to be fair the reward structure for those coordinating things is only that their lives aren’t going to suck as badly until the thing is built and they are interred with the commisioner of the project. Ambiguity in the project is generally low — it’s all about execution. Sometimes literally. You know what you want to build. It’s been done before. Ideas for how to do things come from the top.
On the other end of the spectrum would be trying to land a person on the moon. Looking back at the moon landings it’s interesting just how a group of people managed to get together and make it happen at all. We haven’t been able to reproduce the feat in the 50+ years since and our current efforts aren’t exactly going to plan. Intrinsic motivation is good for solving things characterised by a high degree of uncertainty or ambiguity. You cannot succeed in these kinds of projects if people aren’t looking around corners, anticipating problems and improvising as the project progresses. Meaningful engineering projects require a much higher degree of intrinsic motivation because they require you to harness the collective perspectives of everyone towards a common goal. They require people to stand up and be accountable. Ideas come from all parts of the organisation. The leaders of the organisation fulfill the role of defining problems and outcomes — the vision towards which efforts are focused.
In between these two extremes are varying degrees of punishment, reward, and alignment with personal needs (such as needing to pay your mortgage or for food).
If you’re looking to understand the theory and some of the research behind this then I can highly recommend reading Dan Pink’s book — Drive or watching the RSA animation of it (below):
When researchers sought to understand motivation they started from the perspective that you get what you reward. Then they discovered something completely different. Once you’ve reached a certain level of reward to cover your basic needs then offering greater rewards only works when the task being carried out is manual and repetitive. For tasks requiring problem-solving or imagination — offering greater rewards at this point decreases task performance.
In order for people to get to self-determination and intrinsic motivation there are 3 things required:
- Autonomy. The amount of say you have in your work is important. If you feel like you own what you’re doing then your motivation goes up. It’s worth noting that autonomy for the sake of autonomy is just chaos. You can only have useful autonomy when you have context and alignment (that’s a story for another day).
- Purpose. You have to believe in what you’re doing and how you’re going about doing it. When NASA went to the moon the sense of purpose was through the roof. Big Tech has very deliberately cultivated this sense of purpose via investing in employer branding. Before you even walk through the door you’re being told about the special unique culture you’re walking into. Employers know that binding you to a sense of purpose matters to get the best out of you. Unfortunately, this also increases imposter syndrome and makes it harder to leave — it is partly to blame for amplifying the mental health effects being felt by those caught up in layoffs.
- Mastery. You’re able to perfect existing skills and develop new skills. Without this, you stagnate and repeat the same things over and over again with decreasing levels of care and attention.
If any one of those things is missing then you won’t have intrinsic motivation and you will be operating at a third or less of your potential. As a leader, you need to ask yourself how these needs at met for every person individually within your team.
One of the theories for the Google (and big tech) Layoffs that’s being floated around right now is that it’s about regaining control of the workforce and instilling a sense of fear. There is perhaps an argument to be made that the reward structures in these companies were harming innovation. Threat invalidates any chance you have of achieving intrinsic motivation. As soon as people are fearing for their jobs or safety then they will work only just hard enough to protect themselves and no harder. A sense of ownership evaporates and people lose interest in the big picture (purpose) due to the need to look after themselves. In this environment, your rocket is more likely to explode on the launchpad than propel human beings beyond our atmosphere. You aren’t landing anyone on the moon anytime soon.
Until recently Google (and big tech) used a combination of purpose and reward to bind people together. You were rewarded well but it was easy to find a sense of purpose. After all, your products were being used by billions of people. The impact you could have was enormous. It’s easy to find purpose in that. The skills required to deliver value required personal growth every day and you were given a lot of freedom to to carry it out. Google prided itself on the concept of moonshots — even to the detriment of repetitive incremental innovation.
After the last couple of weeks that has changed. People still at the company are afraid — they don’t know why 12,000 of their colleagues were laid off. For those waiting outside the US, they are waiting to hear if they are affected — in fact they were expecting to hear what’s next 5 days ago but have received radio silence this week. If the goal was to induce fear in their workforce and make their employees more biddable then what the execs of big tech have managed is to ensure that people are more likely to show up for the money. They aren’t going to get the best most brilliant versions of their employees anymore. So they will lose out beyond even losing 12,000 talented people from their workforce.
Even if this wasn’t the intention of the executives making these calls — this is what is happening. Looking at their packages — it’s unclear why the execs are even there. They have more money than they will ever need — research shows that throwing more money at them won’t make them better at their jobs — the opposite in fact. They seem to have no purpose beyond accumulating more of it. And, history tells us that when people with too much wealth have nothing more to chase then they start building monuments. One thing is for sure — Google isn’t going to be a moonshot factory any more.