Understand your impact to increase your motivation

Topic: Personal brand, Confidence, Emotional Intelligence

Imagine a competitive game of football in which more than half the players aren’t sure what position they’re playing, or which goal posts they should be shooting towards.

If a new study is anything to go by, there’s a similar issue at play in the workforces of the corporate world.

Only 47 percent of employees, it found, can clearly identify the correlation between what they do on a daily basis, and how this impacts the bottom line. Or, put another way, 53 percent of individuals have little clue how their efforts feed into their employers’ success.[i]

Another study paints a bleaker reality still, showing that the majority of employees don’t understand their employer’s vision, business goals, strategy, brand promise, key initiatives or marketplace realities. Only 37 percent can claim to have a grasp of what their employer is trying to achieve.[ii]

Such results provide some clear takeaways for organisations: communicate your company vision and goals better in order to take a giant leap towards achieving them through enhanced worker clarity, motivation and productivity.

But while they’re waiting for organisations to invest in transparency and sharing of information, what can individuals do to increase their motivation through understanding their impact?

1. SEE THE SMALLER PICTURE

Struggling to see how that big company directive relates to what’s on your to-do list? One solution is to do a little job crafting.

In 2001, a team of US academics set out to understand how people in low paid “devalued” work coped in their roles. They found that in a team of hospital janitors there were two distinct groups: those who found their jobs demeaning and devaluing, and those who were motivated and happy in their work.^{^[iii]}

[We] discovered a subset of the hospital’s cleaners who didn’t see themselves as part of the janitorial staff at all. These individuals saw themselves as part of the professional staff and as an integral part of the healing team. They got to know patients and families and offered support in small but important ways: a box of tissues here, a glass of water there. Or a word of encouragement. One housekeeper reported rearranging pictures on the walls of comatose patients, with the hope that the change of scenery might have some positive effect. That perspective changed everything.^{^[iv]}

The professors coined a new term to explain what was happening, “job crafting”. This essentially means that people often take existing job expectations – or job descriptions – and expand them to suit their desire to make a difference. In other words, job crafters are those who do what’s expected (because it’s required) and then find a way to add something new to their work that benefits their team, their company, or their customer.”

2. POWER UP YOUR BOSS PARTNERSHIP

If you’re confused about how your work impacts the wider company, could it be that those around you are too? Rather than take the issue to your boss as a problem, asking for clarification that he or she might not be able to provide, suggest that the two of you compare goals for the year. Where are the direct parallels between what your boss is expected to achieve, and what you, his or her support system, are being measured against? Watch the video below to hear how an executive who, in undertaking this exercise, formed a deeper, more collaborative bond with his boss, which led to greater divisional success.

3. MINE COMPANY INFORMATION

In an ideal world, a business would share information pertinent to its employees’ motivation and productivity in accessible ways. But it might just be that the information you’re after is buried somewhere on your staff intranet, so take time and be prepared to dig. This needn’t mean scouring endless company data reports. The answer you’re looking for might be in something as simple as the company’s unofficial tagline. Take NIKE Inc’s strapline: ‘To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world’. Whether you’re selling shoes in a high-street store, engineering new soles in a lab or a logistics expert working out how to get shipments of merchandise from A to B, you’ll be able to find your purpose in that statement.

4. GET CREATIVE AND COLLABORATIVE

If you can’t find a strapline, take matters into your own hands. “If your company doesn’t have a simple mission and vision, then create one for your team (I worked for a business leader who did this, and the team loved it). When you clarify the overall purpose, employees can begin to understand their individual impact on the overall company,” says leadership consultant Michelle Checketts.

5. BE THE TRANSPARENT LEADER YOU WISH YOU HAD

“Culture is not a ‘goal’ to be mandated, but the outcome of a collective set of behaviours,” writes management consultant Ron Ashkenas in the Harvard Business Review. “Whether you are a CEO or a department manager you can influence those behaviours in several ways – and by so doing shape the culture of the firm.”

Put this thinking into the perspective of the problem we’re discussing. Do you share information widely? When setting priorities for your direct reports are you clear about why one task is more urgent than another? When you set performance goals, do you take the time to explain why they matter? Demonstrating the kinds of behaviours you wish to see in your superiors can lead to surprising outcomes.