Do you agree with this? Because I sure don’t. I think that attitude misrepresents the true nature of most jobs, which really don’t involve that many opportunities for meaningful employee decisions. The majority of us cannot be bosses. And I, to be honest, really couldn’t care less about the vast majority of decisions to be made. I just want management to make a decision, give me clear directive, and stay the fuck out of my way.
My main interest - probably even more than money - is that my job have strict time and space limits and stay the hell out of my private life.
There was an article about this question in Harvard Business Review not long ago. While the comment quoted seems to be in the ballpark of what the article described, it’s a little bit off.
The author found that financial incentives are not very effective at increasing productivity, especially over the long term. He argues that the way to help people get better at their jobs is to make the work more rewarding.
The methods he suggests are things like empowering people to carry things out, whether that means make decisions or to implement the decisions already made, without making workers feel like a cog in the machine, just another rubber stamp, etc. Another thing he suggests is kind of a Six Sigma approach to work, to realize that work which doesn’t contribute to success is not only a waste of money, but also hurts employee’s interest in doing any work. (See: “TPS reports.”)
Here is a short article on the author’s point of view.
I don’t think I can answer the poll question because I don’t think the question is phrased appropriately to the issue. I think the author’s view is worth taking seriously, because as I look around at high-performing organizations with motivated employees who like their work, the biggest differences I see are in management, not pay.
What you describe makes a lot more sense than what the other guy posted, but I admit I am still somewhat cynical.
For every management that actually applies such meaningful “empowerment” practices, my experience and suspicion is that there are far more that merely give lipservice to them, which can be even more defeating than not even making a pretense.
And I think a great deal of this “decision-making” applies more to “management-type” jobs involving greater discretion. I mean, how meaningfully can you empower a factory line worker or supermarket cashier?
Here in DC, there’s a summer youth employment program. Basically many thousands of teenagers are hired for a couple months in the summer to do anything from pick up trash on the street to being a junior intern in a city government office.
One of the jobs is to help janitors clean out schools. One group of kids went to Janitor A, who told them to mop everywhere on the second floor, windex the windows, vacuum up the dirt, etc. When done, find Janitor A and tell him they are done. Basically, the kids knew they got a crap job, and acted like it.
Janitor B told the kids to walk around the third floor and make a list of everything that’s wrong or needed cleaning. Then prioritize the list. Then bring the list back to Janitor B for his approval, and he’s going to make changes. Then the kids would decide who to should do each task, etc. In this anecdote, the kids with Janitor B didn’t feel like their job was crap, even though they end up doing the same thing as the other group, for the same pay.
Look, I like empowerment. Drives me nuts when I should get it and don’t. And I love my actual job. But I’d take a hit on all of that to make a lot more money. (Not a little, but definitely for a lot.) I don’t live to work.
I really like my job. SysAdmin for a very large international firm. It’s varied and sometimes challenging, conditions are very good and the people I work with including management are all decent people who don’t try and shaft you for no reason. It’s the best job I’ve ever had which is why I’ve been here 10 years.
That said it’s all about the Benjamin’s. I work so I can live not live so I can work. If I had enough money I’d never work a day in my life again and not miss it.
I am a teacher ,and I live to work. I love my job, and a lot of what I love about it is that I am the emperor of my own little fiefdom: my bosses tell me to 1) keep as many in AP classes as possible and 2) of those, get as many as possible to pass the AP exams. Within those goals in mind, I get to decide what books and articles we read, what assignments they do, how things are assessed, everything. Because I am very good at my job, I have a tremendous amount of autonomy and I love that. I do not take direction well.
Right now, the trend is away from allowing teachers this kind of autonomy: schools are strongly moving towards having every teacher of a subject follow the same pacing and use all the same assessments. The idea is that once the “best” method is determined, they should all use it. I think that kind of lock-step thinking will drive a lot of strong-personality types (like myself) out of teaching, and strong personality is important for teaching.
So far I have avoided this fate by producing the results they want, and by teaching classes that no one else teaches (small school). But I value this autonomy as much as I value my paycheck: I need to be able to use creative problem solving skills on a daily basis.
It depends on the scenario in which I have to make the choice. If I have to choose between two job offers, then I’ll take the one with less power but more money. However, if you want to know in which one I’ll work harder, it’ll be the one with more power.
For me, the paycheck is divorced from the job. The paycheck just sort of appears every two weeks and isn’t affected by how much effort I put into my work. So if I have no power and I feel like a cog, I’m going to do the bare minimum and slack off as much as possible. Given some power and decision-making ability, I’ll work my ass off just for the satisfaction of having done a good job. In neither scenario does money come into play.
Money’s only important when choosing between two jobs. And in that case, it’s very important.
Absolutely correct, and I’m one of the people who left because of this nonsense. IMHO, the field is worse off for my departure. Right now, they only seem to want robots in the field. What’s worse is that the “best method” inevitably changes. Good teachers know this, and keep learning and improving because it’s the right thing to do as a professional. Weaker teachers just do what they’re told without thinking about it and never really improve what they do. They just swing with the pendulum.
I valued it more than a paycheck, when I had it. Nobody goes into teaching for the money - if they do, they’re either stupid or uninformed. Those who go into it for the right reasons want to be teachers and see it as a worthy craft. My pay was ultimately less important to me than the ability to actually BE a teacher without having to jump through administrative hoops or work from a canned curriculum.
The problem I have with the whole “best practices” bullshit is that it is all about finding perfect “activities” and assessments. “We will give you great activities!” is the promise at every staff development. What I’ve come to realize over the last ten years is that the activities don’t matter: the psychology does. If you understand how kids think and you understand where, exactly, their learning and understanding collapses, any activity will work (or at least, devising activities is trivial because you know what you are looking for). If you do not have that understanding, no activity will work because you don’t know what you are doing and what bits are the important bits–it’s like trying to follow a recipe when you don’t know anything about the cuisine.
I’d love to go to a seminar that was “25 stupid ideas kids have about economics” or “25 weird misconceptions immigrant kids have about American Schools”. Instead, it’s “25 Ways to Fold Paper”.
The notion that employees want “empowerment” rather than pay is part of the stupid, lying bullshit that a lot of companies–particularly but not exclusively retail–try to get their people to swallow.
Actually, I cited someone as an expert on this subject who is all about “empowerment” (if you want to boil the issue down to that) and he is about as far away from corporate America as you can get. He’s far more Birkenstocks than wingtips.
You’re right that this is a sleazy tactic, and a misuse of the real issue. There’s obviously a difference between using the argument in that manner and advocating for ACTUAL empowerment for employees. Smart business people realize having workers who respect themselves and see value in their work are more likely to be good for the business in the long term.
Ravenman - I’ve been thinking about what you said - and the janitor example - and I’m still not convinced. Tho people in more menial and labor intensive jobs might say they want empowerment, I wonder how much if any pay they would give up in exchange.
When you get lower on the pay scale, I think $ becomes even more important. If you already make a decent wage, you might be willing to give up a few luxuries in exchange for job satisfaction. But if you are unskilled and low paid, I suspect you will likely asccept considerable grief for a higher paycheck. Just my WAG (tho I am wearing Birkies as I type!)
I also question the janitor example. Sure, it might make the summer employees feel better to be asked to prioritize what needs to be done, but in every janitorial job I ever did there is a sizeable base of tasks - such as mopping, vacuuming, cleaning the johns - that simply has to be done on a regular basis and takes up a good chunk (if not most) of your time. So while it might make a kid feel good to be able to express his opinion, I fear the necessary response will likely be “Sounds good - feel free to hop to that after you are done mopping, vacuuming, etc.”
And of course, summer employement is not exactly the same as someone a year or ten into their same job…
I hear what you’re saying, and a lot of it makes sense, but let me just say again that the proposition of how to encourage better work performance isn’t the same question as asking a worker if he’d like more pay or more power.
To put it another way, if I ask someone whether you’d like a giant piece of cheesecake after dinner, or if you’d like to go run 5 miles, most people will say they want the cheesecake. However, if people were to forgo cheesecake and run 5 miles, they will be more likely to live happier, more active, longer lives. Note that I’m not saying that people should never eat cheesecake (or take a job just for the pay), or imply that they are doing something short-sighted or reckless.
The allegation that you quoted in the OP, stated a different way, is that there is a better correlation between good management and workers doing good jobs than there is between compensation and workers doing jobs well. Furthermore, I’d bet that there is a much stronger correlation between doing a good job and being happy with your job than there is between income and being happy with your job, once you control for the fact that someone who is making minimum wage probably hates going home to eat cold beans every night anyway.
But the point is that workers at the very lowest of the low positions can be given responsibility to make decisions. (And, in this case, I think it’s a great example of kids being taught important workplace skills other than mopping and sweeping – things like problem solving, dealing with authority figures, negotiation, prioritizing work, etc.) You doubted whether a factory worker can be “empowered,” and I gave you an example of someone much lower on the ladder than a factory worker being able to make decisions.
Since I’m thinking of it, factory workers are great sources of decision-making and ideas. A factory worker at Boeing found that the best way to load seats into an airplane that’s being built is to have the same machine that lifts hay bales used to lift the seat sections into the plane. It reduced the time it takes to install seats in a 737 from like a day and a half to just two hours.
ETA:
Yes. Bad management makes people hate their jobs. That’s most of what I’m saying.
We would all love a job that meets our needs for creative expression or whatever. Once my job did that for me, I had choices and the work was interesting. Now the work is boring and rote and I get yelled at by idiots with one tenth my experience, yet I am still here for the money.
As I told my boss: I come here and do what you tell me every day for the money. I do a good job when you let me have some say in how it’s done.
We’re pretty much on the same page. After however many rounds of proposed empowerment, TQM, teamwork, etc., over my 25 year career, I really wonder how significant of changes I will see within my working career…
