This is a short article outlining what I believe to be a concise, prioritised list of motivations for work. Trouble results if any are missing or if they are mis-ordered.
The Background
I believe that there should be three critical motivations to work, in a specific priority order. I’m committing my thoughts to “paper” in this article because these three motivations have become very apparent to me during several decades of employment, across many companies, locations and roles, and because the topic has come up frequently in discussions during the last few months of 2017; the year in which I stopped to think about my direction in life, and effected a major change of career.
I hope that this major change of career has better aligned me to these three motivations, and their ideal ordering.
The Theory
Motivation #1 – We work to be USEFUL
Being “useful” involves both applying innate (or learned) talents in which we find we can add value, and choosing to apply these talents on an endeavour that makes a positive difference to peoples’ lives.
For this motivation to properly function, it needs to be performed within an organisation that enables useful work, rather than obstructing it (e.g. via strategies which one is forced to accept, whilst knowing that they run counter to an ability to perform usefully).
I recall working in one organisation in which an overpaid CIO enthusiastically floated the idea of removing one monitor from each technology employee, so as to “save money”, rather ignoring the resultant loss of productivity that two screens provided. I offered to “sponsor” (pay for) my own second monitor if this strategy was pushed through, preferring to continue to be efficient in spite of the company’s apparent desire to throw a roadblock in the way.
Motivation #2 – We work to be APPRECIATED for being USEFUL
Being recognised by a manager or, better still, a direct client who has benefitted from your efforts, is the best reward for motivation #1. Indeed if there is no such client, then one has to question whether the effort spent on #1 has genuinely been useful. In some circumstances, there may be no feedback loop available for the recipient of your efforts to communicate back to you. In that case, there can still be a Zen satisfaction in a job well done, and a positive result based on your own judgement of effort well-applied.
Organisations often seem to get this wrong by imposing anonymity (e.g. via the dreaded “support” email mailbox) between workers and their clients. Fortunately, humanity usually finds away around such corporate obfuscation, and positive worker/client relationships (and feedback loops) result.
Motivation #3 – We work to be COMPENSATED as a result of #1 and #2
I believe that compensation should flow logically from our ability to be useful and from the fact that we are being appreciated for being useful. In the absence of these, compensation may be a result of nepotism, deftly-deployed politics, back-stabbing, or the “Peter Principle”. None of these is a good foundation for self-worth and anyone with an ounce of self-awareness will recognise the shaky foundation of their compensation, if they owe it to factors other than their ability to add value.
We all know of too many people who spend their working lives in an environment in which motivations #1 and/or #2 are absent, and the focus is entirely on #3. This can, of course, be an example of noble self-sacrifice, but is more usually a case of unnecessarily self-imposed misery for which a better alternative exists.
Conclusion
I guess that I could at this point insert an ingenious disclaimer along the lines of “the above is all my own opinion, and may be entirely incorrect”, but I won’t, as I’m confident in the truth of these principles; for me, at least.
If you are unhappy in your work, I’d suggest that you look for opportunities to recalibrate your role so as to focus on these three motivations in the correct order and, if the organisation and/or role doesn’t enable you to do so, look elsewhere.
Life is literally too short not to. Good luck!
