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Outsource Inspiration
When employee motivation is lacking, many leaders grab the loudspeaker. They stand up, deliver an inspiring speech, and hope for the best. There is reason to believe, though, that it is often more effective for leaders to take a backseat. Leaders can accomplish more by outsourcing inspiration to end users—the people who benefit from the organization’s products and services. It is a different way of motivating and engaging employees, one that recognizes the power of leaders’ actions to speak louder than their words. By making connections to end users, leaders can enable employees to identify their past and potential contributions, injecting greater meaning into work.
Why Outsourcing Inspiration Matters
Meaningful work is a cornerstone of motivation.1 For many years, researchers have recognized the motivating potential of task significance—doing work that affects the well-being of others.2 But all too often, employees do work that makes a difference but never have the chance to see or to meet the people affected by their work.
Ten years ago, I found this sign in a call center at the University of Michigan: “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit. You get a warm feeling, but no one else notices.” A natural solution was to help the callers see how the money they raised was making a difference. At the beginning of a calling shift, a leader described how the funds contributed to new buildings, faculty and staff salaries, and—perhaps most importantly—the Michigan football and basketball teams.
My team’s role was to track the effects, and there were none. The callers did not work any harder or more productively. We realized that it might be the right message, but it was coming from the wrong source. When a leader articulated the importance of the work, the callers were suspicious. After all, the leader had an ulterior motive of convincing them to work harder.
To overcome this problem, we randomly divided the callers among three groups. For the face-to-face contact group, we invited a scholarship student, Will, to talk firsthand about the importance of the work. He spent five minutes with the callers, explaining that their work had helped to fund his scholarship, that it had changed his life, and that he wanted to thank them for their efforts. Other callers read a letter from him without any direct contact, and the remaining callers were in a control group with no exposure to Will.
Over the next month, on average, the callers who met Will spiked 142 percent in weekly minutes on the phone and 171 percent in weekly revenue. The callers who merely read the letter or had no contact with him showed no changes in effort or productivity. A five-minute interaction with a single scholarship recipient was enough to dramatically increase motivation and effectiveness.3 Those callers who met Will developed a stronger sense that their work made a difference, felt more valued and appreciated—instead of rejected and disrespected by alumni—and recognized that other scholarship students were depending on them. Once they realized that their work could be so valuable to others, they became motivated to work harder. They also gained new information that enabled them to work smarter, sharing scholarship stories on the phone with alumni.
In total, we replicated the effect five times with different callers and scholarship students. In one case, a short interaction with a scholarship recipient boosted individual callers’ weekly revenue by more than 400 percent, from weekly averages of under $412 to over $2,083.4 In contrast, there were no significant changes in callers’ behavior or performance when leaders and managers delivered the same information5 or when we invited a former caller to address the personal benefits of the job for learning and career advancement.6 The boost in motivation appears to be unique to seeing firsthand how one’s work is beneficial to other people.
This effect holds true in a wide range of health and safety jobs. Consider the following evidence:
• Nurses. When assembling surgical kits, nurses who met the health-care practitioners who would use the kits worked 64 percent more minutes, completed more than twice as many pieces, and made 15 percent fewer errors than nurses in a control group who had no beneficiary contact.7
• Radiologists. When the patient’s photo was included in their file, radiologists wrote 29 percent longer reports and achieved 46 percent greater diagnostic accuracy in scanning exams.8
• Lifeguards. After reading stories about other lifeguards performing rescues, lifeguards increased their average monthly hours worked by 43 percent, and supervisors rated them as 21 percent more helpful. These effects were driven by perceiving the job as having a greater impact on swimmers and feeling more valued by swimmers.9
• Physicians and nurses. Merely mentioning that hand hygiene protects patients against diseases increased soap and gel usage by more than 45 percent and hand washing by more than 10 percent.10
• Pharmaceutical employees. Hearing a patient talk for an hour about experiences with treating a disease significantly increased engagement scores on a survey two months later. Employees reported greater pride in the organization, a stronger sense of commitment and willingness to go beyond the requirements of the job, and a heightened belief in the meaningfulness of the organization’s vision in their daily jobs.11
Research also shows that exposure to the impact of one’s work can motivate greater effort and performance in more mundane tasks:12
• Giving feedback. When making suggestions to improve job application cover letters for a student who needed a job, people who briefly saw the student worked 18 percent longer than those who did not see the student.
• Editing. When correcting grammar in an international student’s research paper, people who saw a video of a student who benefited from this type of feedback in the past caught 34 percent more errors than those who saw a video of the leader describe the same information, and 37 percent more errors than a control group who saw no video.
• Generating a marketing campaign. When creating a pitch for a new service, people who read a letter from a customer who benefited from the service developed ideas that were rated by experts as 11 percent higher in quality than ideas from people who read an identical letter from a leader describing the customer’s experience.
Strategies for Connecting to Your Own Impact
In light of these motivational benefits, what can you do to increase your own awareness of your impact? Over the past decade, I’ve encountered four different ways that leaders can connect the dots between what they do on the job and its consequences for others.
1. Pay periodic visits to end users. In many organizations, leaders have little contact with the end users who benefit from their work. Busy schedules make it difficult to rank trips to see clients and customers as a priority, and this often means an impoverished understanding of the impact of your work. By making it a priority to spend time with end users, you can gather information about their needs and your contributions. At IBM, for example, Lou Gerstner required his top fifty senior executives to visit at least five of IBM’s largest customers in a three-month period.13 As one observer explains, “That empathic connection to real-world customers helped managers to see whether a particular decision added value for customers or destroyed it.”14
2. Seek internal feedback. As a leader, much of your impact is on people inside the organization. It is surprisingly common, though, for leaders to lack awareness of how their work makes a difference in the lives of employees. Evidence suggests that one of the most reliable steps for solving this problem is to meet twice per month with each of your employees.15 Regular meetings serve to increase trust and communication quality, enabling employees to more clearly articulate the impact of your relationship. (Interestingly, whereas many leaders view such meetings as time-sapping distractions, research suggests that they actually save time, in part by reducing interruptions by up to 80 percent—employees save their requests until meetings.)16 At each meeting, it is worth asking what you have done that has been the most and the least helpful—and how employees and mentees have implemented the advice and suggestions that you gave in the previous meeting.
3. Keep a journal about your contributions. It is easy to lose sight of how your actions make a difference. In high-pressure jobs, with many strategic priorities and interactions, many leaders are too busy doing work to reflect on its significance. One small step for combating this challenge is to keep a journal about how you have made a difference. In an experiment with fund-raising callers, Jane Dutton and I found that writing about contributions for less than an hour per week was enough to boost hourly calls by more than 29 percent.17 The journaling process appeared to reinforce their sense that their jobs mattered and to strengthen their identities as helpful, giving individuals, energizing them to contribute more. But timing matters in two ways. First, the boost does not always occur right away: evidence from firefighters and rescue workers suggests that on days where they have made a big difference, they experience gains in energy only after they have had time to reflect.18 Second, research indicates that journaling about positive experiences is more beneficial once a week rather than once a day, likely because writing weekly feels more novel and allows time for a few meaningful contributions to add up.19
4. Become an end user. One of the easiest ways to understand how your work makes a difference for clients or customers is to become a client or customer. Using your organization’s products or services can shed new light on the consequences of your job. For example, at Patagonia, founder Yvon Chouinard encourages leaders and employees to field-test outdoor sports products, and at Four Seasons Hotels, new employees are invited to do a “familiarization stay” overnight in their own hotels.20 The more experience you gain with your organization’s offerings, the more you can internalize the end user’s perspective and understand the past and future impact of your work.
Connecting Employees to Their Impact
Beyond seeing your own impact more clearly, you can take the initiative to help employees across the organization see how their efforts make a difference. Leaders at several innovative organizations have introduced three kinds of strategies that serve this purpose.
1. Make the face-to-face connection. The most direct way of connecting employees to their impact is to invite end users to visit the organization.21 At John Deere, many employees who built tractors had no interaction with the customers who would one day drive the tractors. Leaders decided to invite farmers who bought their first tractors to bring their families to the factory. Employees who worked on those tractors come to congratulate the farmers, give them a gold key, and see the joy on their faces as they turn the key to start the ignition. At Medtronic, engineers who design medical devices and sales-people who sell them to hospitals are able to see their impact at the company’s annual holiday party. Six patients share their stories about how the company’s products have transformed their lives. Many employees break down into tears and walk away with an enriched understanding of the purpose behind their jobs.
2. Encourage employees to swap stories. In situations where it is not easy to facilitate face-to-face interactions, an alternative is to invite employees to share their own stories of making a difference. For example, at Merrill Lynch teams start weekly meetings by opening the floor for employees to relay experiences about helping clients, and at Ritz-Carlton hotels, employees have daily fifteen-minute meetings to exchange “wow” stories about how they have gone above and beyond the call of duty to benefit customers. When employees hear stories about impact from their colleagues, they can become more aware of the significance of their past contributions and recognize greater potential to make future contributions.
3. Become a linking pin. Giving end users the microphone does not mean watching the game from the sidelines. As a leader, you serve as a linking pin22 to fill the gap between employees and end users. By leveraging your network, you can often find clients, customers, patients, and other beneficiaries of your organization’s products and services who have novel stories to share. Further, recent studies show that among nurses23 and fund-raising callers,24 meeting end users is even more powerful when it happens in tandem with an inspiring speech from leaders. When you articulate your vision, you can invite end users to help bring the vision to life. At Medtronic’s annual party, for example, senior leaders describe Medtronic’s mission in conjunction with testimonials from patients. Along with connecting employees to end users, you can build a bridge between end users’ specific stories and the organization’s broader vision.
Putting It All Together
Outsourcing inspiration may sound like common sense, but it is not common practice. Surprisingly few leaders take the initiative to show how the organization’s day-to-day work has meaningful, lasting benefits to other people. By forging these connections, it is possible to create work environments that are infused with richer meaning, deeper relationships, and greater productivity.
OUTSOURCING INSPIRATION AT WELLS FARGO
At Wells Fargo, manager Ben Soccorsy took over a low-interest personal loan product. For five years, the product group was languishing, having failed to grow the business. Soccorsy knew the loan had rescued some customers from severe debt; in one case, a customer facing eighteen years of debt was able to become debt-free in a third of the time. Nevertheless, bankers were detached from this impact on customers. “You have 70 million customers and 200 loan products, and you’re busy in meetings and pulling information in Excel. It’s really hard to create that connectivity: How does that end up helping people?”
Soccorsy decided to reposition the loan as a pathway to getting out of debt. His aim was to connect the product to everyday customer needs. He wanted to communicate the message to a wide range of bankers efficiently, but also powerfully. Knowing that videos were an important part of banker training, he proposed to create videos that conveyed how the low-interest loans had saved customers from debt.
Initially, some insiders were skeptical. “They didn’t understand why we would take my precious time and other people’s precious time to do storytelling or make a video. Didn’t I have a business to run?” To overcome resistance, Soccorsy highlighted how the initiative was intertwined with the vision of the company, which focused on helping customers succeed financially. After gaining internal support, he created a proposal and a budget. Then his team began reaching out to bankers and customers to identify powerful stories from around the United States and filmed five videos. A typical video started with a customer problem, profiled the banker-customer interaction, and showed the consequences for the customer. “Customers felt like they had a massive weight lifted off their shoulders,” Soccorsy says, and the videos displayed “the raw emotion with customers when bankers helped them find some light at the end of the tunnel.”
When bankers watched the videos, “it was like a light switch turned on,” Soccorsy says. “They really were connecting the impact on the customer to their day-to-day work. Bankers realized the impact their work could have—that this loan can really make a difference in customers’ lives. It was a really compelling motivator. They gave the whole effort another look. It humanized our work and how important it is to customers. It’s a way to connect the dots—a secret weapon that we don’t use enough.”25 The product became a major source of growth for the company, and doubled in size in the span of just a few years.
TWEETS
Outsource inspiration: instead of motivating employees with your words, give the microphone to customers.
Leaders are linking pins: they connect employees to the people who find their work meaningful.
Meeting one person who benefits from your work can boost your productivity by more than 400 percent.