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Meaningful Work Research – would you like to participate?


Commissioned by the Government the 2017 Taylor Report  states that ‘good work’ should be a national priority.

It stresses that people should be able to flourish and grow at work improving their well-being whilst driving productivity. Respecting and trusting people to do a good job also creates an adaptive workforce that can deal with uncertainties such as digitalisation and Brexit.

The bottom line is that employees want to be heard and have meaningful work. They want to know they are doing something useful, something that they can feel proud of.

I am looking for organisations who are interested in getting a deeper understanding of whether they create meaningful work.  The research is aimed at validating my Meaningful Work Matrix which considers:

  • Being Your Best : This is a process of engagement and congruence as employees endorse their work as being aligned to their own values and beliefs. The research asks whether employee’s work contributes to their own meaning in life, whether employees have the opportunity to express themselves at work and whether they like who they are at work.
  • Doing Your Best : This is a physical expression of autonomy and competence as employees endorse their own behavior.  The research asks if employees feel competent at work , whether they have clear goals and feel a sense of accomplishment at work.
  • Doing For Others :  This is about creating a clear sense of what really matters to the organization and its corporate identity. This creates a sense of purpose and impact amongst employees.  The research asks if employees feel they really help customers/clients and whether employees see the connection between their day-to-day work and the organisations purpose.
  • Being With Others : Employees feel a sense of belonging and relatedness as they interpret their own behaviours in relation to others creating cultural meaning.  Here the research asks whether employees get on with one another and how committed they are to the organisation’s success.

Continue reading “Meaningful Work Research – would you like to participate?”

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The results are in!

I would be interested in your comments and thoughts on the results…

Please scroll down to leave a comment.

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Motivation : Why do we do what we do?

Simply put, motivation is why we do what do – it is the reason behind behaviour.  And there is no change in organisations without behavioural change.  So understanding what drives employee behaviour is critical for organisations that want to adapt and flourish.

This motivation poll is a starting point. It is my first step to an in-depth research project that will integrate the best and most relevant theories into a practical and pragmatic model for employee motivation.

You can take the poll below or click here  – it will only take 5 minutes.

Create your own user feedback survey

The aim of the poll is to give an initial idea on which motivational theories you use and which best fit with your experience of motivating employees.

We will send you through the results of the survey before Christmas!

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Performance conversations : Quality not quantity



Employees can dread having performance conversations.  My research shows that performance conversations can drive down an individual’s performance.  So encouraging managers to have more performance conversations with employees to drive motivation may have the opposite effect.  I analysed thousands of performance conversations and found that the key driver to improving  business performance was the quality of conversation.

But what is a quality conversation?  I was lucky enough to be able to segment the conversations into those focussed on the employee’s business objectives (i.e. how the employee performed against their individual objectives that link to the corporate goals via the balanced scorecard) and development goals (i.e. those focussed on how the employee wanted to develop in the coming year).

There was a key difference between these two conversations.  The conversation around the employee’s business objectives was backward looking – the traditional feedback conversation.  The conversation about the employee’s development was future-focussed – a ‘feedforward’ conversation.   My analysis showed that these feedforward conversations had a higher correlation with an employee’s performance than the feedback conversation.

Future-focussed conversations with employees is one technique used in strengths based performance management.  But very little research has been conducted on these types of interventions.  This prompted the CIPD to conduct some research in partnership with the UK Civil Service.  The research showed that after the strengths based interventions, employees are more likely to agree to the statement ‘I receive regular feedback on my performance’.  And these feedback discussions are predominately development focussed!  Critically the research shows that employees whose managers undertook the strengths based interventions are more likely to report that they find their conversations with their managers useful, and find the conversations help improve their performance.

So maybe the next conversation we have should be strengths based and future-focussed.  We could ask ‘Tell me about the last great piece of work you did?’ and ‘Tell me which of your strengths helped achieve that?’.  The conversation could blossom into what conditions would allow those strengths to be replicated.

So should we start focussing on the quality of conversation rather than the quantity?

 

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Hello world!

Welcome to EbbnFlow’s blogs.  We will be publishing at least 1 blog a month on the  latest and best knowledge of what actually works to help your business succeed.