In the song “If I May Be So Bold,” Hayes Carll muses, “It’s no eternal mystery / You don’t need a hard-earned clue / Why some men do their damnedest when half-a-damn would do.”
I interpret that to mean many people are driven to work hard and give 100% or more.
Why else would so many of my friends voluntarily labor over NY Times puzzles like Wordle, Spelling Bee and the crosswords for leisure? Why would children work so hard building LEGO models and sandcastles for fun?
Psychologists call it internal motivation because the rewards we get from the activity are internal relaxation, pleasure, satisfaction and fulfill basic human needs, like feeling competent, in control and connected to others.
So, despite the media hype around “flavor of the day” workplace trends like quiet quitting, “acting your wage,” “quitting and staying” and “lying flat,” I think most people want to work hard and be productive, challenged and engaged on the job.
A 2023 LinkedIn report backs me up, showing that most employees value challenging work that pushes them to grow. A recent Gallup survey adds that more than anything else, employees prioritize being engaged with their work. That doesn’t sound like quiet quitting to me.
I think younger team members especially get a bad rap because employers misunderstand their workplace expectations as signs of laziness or entitlement. Yes, they may be more adamant about work-life boundaries, flexible schedules and growth opportunities, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to work.
On the contrary, their desire to learn new skills, advance their careers and make an impact is evidence of drive and motivation. And we should celebrate it!
Internal drive all around us
Our tech-savvy team members aren’t born knowing how to fix the latest software glitch. Rather, they’re born with curiosity and a hunger to learn how things work. For example, we have several DS+CO team members who play with new technology for fun, teaching themselves valuable skills in the processand bringing valuable capabilities to our company.
Likewise, the folks on your team who jump at the chance to join task forces, raise their hands during team-building exercises, and volunteer to take on assignments or organize office parties are also internally motivated. They’re not likely to “quiet quit” as long as they feel they get as much out of their job as they put in.
But if they think there’s a mismatch, they can become disillusioned and disengaged, and decide to align their effort with what they get back in terms of what they value most, like compensation, recognition and growth opportunity. An article in MIT Sloan Management Review calls these employees “calibrated contributors.”
To keep high performers feeling engaged and rewarded on par with their contributions, we need to feed their inner drive with relevant challenges and benefits. Here’s how:
Give choice
A just-published Great Place to Work report shows productivity and engagement dropped for both on-site and remote employees when their employer mandated where they work. But when given a choice over remote, hybrid or on-site locations, they were more engaged and willing to go the extra mileand were 14% less likely to “quit and stay.”
Internally motivated team members at all levels are driven to grow, and leaders need to ensure every employee has access to resources and training to advance their careers.
Spotlight opportunities
You may not be able to offer highly visible or costly training programs, so be sure to define and spotlight the opportunities you do make available. Talk up your lunch-n-learns and team-building and communications activities. Remind team members of your subscriptions and memberships to educational resources and industry trade groups that offer on-demand training content, instructional webinars, courses, workshops and conferences. And consider offering a steady stream of smaller training sessionsshort, targeted modulesrather than less frequent, more intense ones to keep engagement and retention high without taxing schedules or budgets.
Learn from your people
To stoke your team members’ inner drive, you need to know what fires them up in the first place. So find out. Show you want to know and truly care, ask questions, get to know what excites them. In one-on-ones and whatever your version of “water cooler conversations” is, ask people what they’d like to learn and where they’d like to go and grow. If they believe you’re their champion, they’ll be more comfortable sharing their goals and dreams.
Younger team members are refreshingly open about admitting what they don’t know and even initiate conversations about skills they’d like to learn and tools they think would benefit the company. At DS+CO, team members frequently bring us ideas for new technologies and processes that could enhance our operations. When we’ve pursued the programs and provided the training, the return on investment has often been significant.
Encourage exploration
People who are internally motivated tend to be curious. They expect and want to learn on the job, continually. So in addition to providing training that allows them to advance in their role, consider supporting sideways mobility and exploration. For example, if a team member wants to test the waters of a different position, you could encourage internal job shadowing, role rotation or cross-functional training. And if they decide they want to make the leap, retrain them.
In my years as a business owner, I’ve learned that when we find a great fit, it’s well worth it to reskill a team member rather than lose them. We’ve had team members move from IT to audio engineering, media buying to strategy, account management to copywriting. One longtime employee has traversed from public relations to account service to strategy to senior leadership over the past 17 years!
Mix it up with meaning
If variety is the spice of life, business as usual is the death of internal drive. Think about how you might change things up, keep work life interesting, and make every day special and better than the one before. It could be through some of what I mentioned earlier with continuous learning, internal mentoring or job shadowing. But don’t stop there. Think about what would make your team members say they love working for your company.
We try to foster the same spirit at DS+ CO. Our Black Businesses Matter and Building Leaders and Creators (BLAC) internship programs made a big impact. We encourage team members to serve on local boards, mentor in the community, and speak at local schools and businesses. There’s great energy around our Habitat for Humanity build days, Thanksgiving basket collections and winter clothing drive, and we’re always looking for new ways to make a differencewith most of our community-service opportunities coming from our team members.
Beyond community service, I’m still surprised by how much people rave about our Ice Cream Thursdays and spontaneous Friday happy hours. And we always get good feedback when we bring in business partners and community members.
Hire driven people
You can’t force team members to be intrinsically motivated to work hard, of course. But you can hire people with strong internal drive and create a culture that continually feeds their desire to perform at ever-higher levels. It’s not easy to discover on a job application or resumeanother reason I wouldn’t let AI make my hiring decisionsbut I’ve learned to recognize signals of internal motivation during interviews.
When I ask applicants what they do in their free time, for example, I look for signs of passion, excitement and active vs. passive activities. Do their eyes light up when they talk about working in a community garden or coaching their child’s soccer team? At the same time, I’ve had to expand my perspective to see that introverts may express motivation differently than extroverts, and writing poetry and long-distance running are also evidence of inner drive.
If you hire internally motivated people from the get-go and give them as much as they give you, you’ve got the foundation for a sustainable, high-performing team.
Lauren Dixon is board chair of Dixon?Schwabl?+ Co., a marketing communications firm, which has?been?honored?as a Best Place to Work.
Copyright © 2024 BridgeTower Media. All Rights Reserved.
Most Popular
Comments / 0