Who Manages Motivation Where the Work Happens?

An employee’s experience often is crafted by multiple departments whose own needs may not be aligned. This article addresses how organizations can achieve better employee results by better understanding all the departments and initiatives affecting their experience.

By Karen Kelly

It’s the Organization That Counts
The Need for Systems Thinking: Alignment, Visibility, Measurement, Continuous improvement.
One Employee, Many Organizational Influences
What If We Managed the Connections?

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If workforce motivation influences the behaviors required to achieve organizational priorities, why wouldn’t the ability to manage it be treated as an organizational capability? Consider the employee experience.

Before an employee ever walks through the door, decisions have already been made about organizational priorities, job design, responsibilities, workload, staffing, compensation, technology, policies, processes, resources, and the capabilities required to perform the work. Then the employee enters the organization.

On that journey, they might encounter a recruiter, a hiring manager, interviewers, onboarding teams. They likely will come upon people in IT, learning and development and of course a supervisor, peers, people in operations, total rewards, payroll, safety, communications, marketing, facilities, and leadership. And those are only the people and functions the employee may see.

Most employees will never see the decisions behind their experience; yet, those decisions create and shape the conditions in which they work, influence their capabilities and workload, and can affect their motivation, behavior, organizational outcomes, impact, and value. In effect, despite all these people involved, most employees experience one organization.

It’s the Organization That Counts

Managing workforce motivation is not about teaching employees to be motivated or assuming a lack of motivation when desired behaviors do not occur. It is about understanding and managing the organizational conditions, capabilities, decisions, and influences that can support or inhibit people’s willingness and ability to contribute.

An employee may be highly motivated and still encounter unclear expectations, excessive workload, inadequate resources, conflicting priorities, difficult processes, insufficient authority, technology limitations, or other friction and barriers that make the required behavior harder, less likely, or sometimes impossible. Behind the employee experience may be many different functions, leaders, systems, priorities, budgets, technologies, processes, investments, and measures.

The Need for Systems Thinking: Alignment, Visibility, Measurement, Continuous improvement.

If these disciplines are important to managing other critical areas of an organization, what might they offer when applying them to the organizational ecosystem influencing workforce motivation and behavior?

Strategic alignment with organizational goals is an important priority across workforce strategies, including Total Rewards. What happens when we follow that alignment all the way to the employee expected to contribute to the result? Consider an organizational priority that depends on people consistently choosing particular behaviors.

Do employees understand what is expected?
Do they have the capabilities required to act?
Do their job responsibilities and workload support what is being asked of them?
Do the processes, resources, technology, policies, and working conditions make the required behaviors possible?
Do managers reinforce the behaviors?
Do decisions made elsewhere in the organization make those behaviors easier or harder?

And when the behaviors occur, are they contributing to the measurable organizational outcomes the strategy was intended to achieve? Connectedness and alignment must be experienced in the work, not merely stated in the strategy.

One Employee, Many Organizational Influences

Think about how many parts of an organization can shape one employee’s experience.
Talent Acquisition may establish expectations.
Learning and Development helps build capability.
Total Rewards influences compensation, benefits, recognition, and rewards.
IT provides technology.
Operations shapes workflows and resources.
HR establishes policies and practices.
Safety influences how work is performed.
Marketing may influence employer brand, communications, events, branded merchandise, and other aspects of the employee experience.
Managers translate, model, and reinforce expectations into daily work.
Leadership establishes priorities and direction.

And many of the people the employee may never meet make decisions about organizational design, job responsibilities, staffing, workload, budgets, technology, policies, processes, resources, and performance measures. Each function may be doing exactly what it was designed to do, but there is a larger question: Who is looking across those decisions from the perspective of the employee expected to perform?

What one function designs, another may have to deliver. What leadership asks people to do may depend on a process, resource, technology, policy, capability, working condition, or decision controlled somewhere else. That is where workforce motivation becomes more than an individual initiative or functional responsibility.

What If We Managed the Connections?

Systems thinking is not new. It has long been applied to quality, operations, safety, processes, risk, and continuous improvement. What if we applied that same thinking to the organizational ecosystem influencing workforce motivation and behavior? That does not necessarily mean adding another initiative.

It may mean gaining greater visibility into what already exists, understanding how the pieces work together, strengthening what is working, connecting what is disconnected, reducing friction, removing barriers, and identifying only the gaps that matter.

The focus begins not with What should we add? or How do we motivate employees? but with a different question:

How do the strategies, systems, investments, people, conditions, and capabilities already surrounding the workforce work together to support the contribution and behaviors required to achieve organizational priorities? The answer will be different for every organization.

Sometimes the opportunity may not be another workforce initiative at all. It may begin with seeing and connecting what is already there.

Employee experience is complex and cross-functional. Who is managing the connections, measuring their impact, and understanding the value they create? And if workforce motivation influences the behaviors required to achieve organizational priorities, perhaps there is another question worth considering:

Why wouldn’t the ability to manage it be treated as an organizational capability? If you followed one of your organizational priorities all the way to the employee doing the work, what would you discover? Are their actions and capabilities truly aligned with what your organization is seeking to achieve.

For More Information

Karen Kelly
Workforce Motivation Management System Advisor
K2 Incentives
karen@k2ultimateincentives.com
Tel. 602-692-2662
www.k2ultimateincentives.com

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