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There’s a temptation to believe that the sheer logic of a good decision will sway the crowd; that if you make a good case and present it in an inspiring way, you’ve done everything you need to for that idea to gain instant uptake in an organisational culture. We’ve yet to see that happen successfully. Motivation is an important consideration in activating a purposeful culture and ensuring that the investment you are making in your culture delivers the returns you are expecting.

There are “how” aspects to why you need to maintain excitement. Presented with a range of reasons as to why change is needed, the opportunity that change could generate and and what it will take to bring about effective systemic change, people are often receptive but inert. They may well agree with some or all of the arguments. But there is too little momentum to shift them from what they’ve done/known for some time to what is now being asked of them.

Often they worry that they’ll do it wrong or that others are less motivated to act than they are. Or they weigh up the new requirements against what is being asked of them already and decide the new actions are too difficult, unproven or unclear.

You want to present people with challenges they will want to rise to.

Motivated to act

The last part of the Activation stage of our Culture to Thrive is Motivation – embedding the stimulants that will compel people not just to embrace their Principled Culture but to bring it to life in their actions and through their teams. This involves providing an environment that is conducive to striving and introducing a whole-relationship approach to motivating people that values them from arrival to exit, and beyond.

The new search for meaning

Meaningful change won’t happen until the change itself means more than the current arrangements mean now. People will make those shifts in how they behave if they are motivated to do so by rewards. Interestingly, many of them are communal rather than purely personal.

In this Tedx talk, behavioural economist Dan Ariely suggests that our motivations to do good work are no longer driven by the efficiency gains that dominated the industrial economy. Instead, we now find incentives in a range of intangibles. These include meaning, being able to create things, challenges, ownership and a sense of pride.

• We are incentivised to act when we can see the results for ourselves.
• People prefer appreciation to money. Conversely, if they will only continue to act if they receive more money, it can be because they feel unmotivated and unappreciated or ignored.
• We value and are proud of work that is difficult and that requires us to expend a greater level of energy.
• We all want to do good in the world, whether we are aware of that drive in ourselves or not.
• We’re more motivated to follow rules if we are aware of how doing so benefits those around us.
• We respond to challenges better than we respond to threats, and we respond to challenges best when we have confidence in our abilities.
• A positive environment sets the scene for focused work.

5 questions for meaningful change

Such insights suggest that organisations looking to achieve meaningful change should be asking themselves questions scoped beyond the usual constraints of WIIFM. Here are five suggestions:

1. How open are you prepared to be about the ongoing effects of change? How, where and when will you report the impacts of what you are now asking people to do?
2. How can you respectfully say thank you to people who do more than what is being asked of them? How will you celebrate what they achieve so that others feel motivated to emulate them?
3. How can you present people with challenges that tax them in good ways? And how will you support them to take up those challenges?
4. Have you spelt out the implications of change for the organisation, for teams, for individuals, for customers and the community? Are those changes the kinds of rewards you would change a deep-seated habit for?
5. What will change in where people work that will encourage them to work differently? What visible proof will there be that things are not as they were and that that’s a good thing?

Culture as a motivator

In an article on how company culture shapes motivation, Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi describe culture as both an ecosystem in its own right and the operating system of the organisation. They cite work by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan from the University of Rochester which lists six main reasons people work: play, purpose, potential, emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia.

Direct motivations

Of these six factors, three are direct motives that improve performance:

• Play – where the motivation is the work itself. Play is our learning instinct, and it’s tied to curiosity, experimentation, and exploring challenging problems.
• Purpose – you value the impact of the work because it fits your identity.
• Potential – doing the work enhances your own outcomes and identity.

Indirect motivations

The remaining three reasons are indirect motives that reduce performance:

• Emotional pressure – you work because you are under pressure to do so. Forms of emotional pressure include guilt, fear, peer pressure, and shame
• Economic pressure – you work to gain a reward or avoid a cost or punishment.
• Inertia – the need to work has no motivation. It’s just something they do but they have no explicable reason for doing so

Perhaps not surprisingly, the authors assert that cultures that inspired more play, purpose, and potential, and less emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia, produced better customer outcomes.

They also found that while most think leadership is a key motivator, people within a culture are also heavily influenced by role design, brand, team performance and a clear sense of career progression. These mechanisms and perceptions play a key role in activating a purposeful culture.

To improve motivation, Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi recommend leaders:

1. Hold a regular reflection huddle with their team based on Play (What did I learn this week?), Purpose (What impact did I have this week?) and Potential (What do I want to learn next week?)
2. Make a point of explaining the why behind the work they are asking people to do.
3. Design roles to enable learning, help people to consider impact and encourage team members to plan to reach their potential.

Embedding end-to-end impetus

Keeping people motivated to deliver their best work is not something that will just happen. As part of activating a purposeful culture, it’s important to create and brand a relationship development framework that seamlessly delivers on Play, Purpose and Potential drivers.

Ours has three parts:

• Arrival – which is about developing an Employee Value Proposition to attract the right people to your culture;
• Tenure – the key here is to provide people with the means and the incentives to go above and beyond (within the context of the brand culture). In addition to the leadership ideas discussed above, it can involve branding recognition and innovation programmes, for example; and
• Exit (and return) – so many cultures don’t think about the people who’ve left them. In fact, those people represent a powerful network, sources of potential business and re-hires into the future. Staying connected with them in ways that recognise them and help them feel included honours the work they did and makes strong commercial sense.

Too often, cultures treat these as line items rather than as a branded and integrated approach to maintaining internal energy.

Motivating others in activating a purposeful culture

A thoughtful Motivation phase is about much more than just stirring people into action. It’s an opportunity for everyone to take ownership of what the new culture could mean for them and to engage in making that happen. Culture change is a process that can be meaningfully guided, without being overbearing. But only if leaders focus on enabling people rather than simply telling them. Embedding “reasons to choose” needs to happen throughout the culture change process. Not just at the beginning. Doing so builds relationships and faith through consistency and maintains commitment.

Culture to Thrive is our strategically focused approach to big picture brand culture change for leaders wanting to align their people, strategy and core principles. You can read more about the range of brand culture services we offer here.

Culture To Thrive helps you find and define what you are striving for as a business. It helps you shape the culture you specifically need as a brand. Together, we’ll build out why you should be one type of culture rather than another. We’ll also work through what you intend to accomplish and how every person can contribute to that.

Please contact us if you’re ready to change up why people believe in giving their best.

Acknowledgements
Photo by Andrew Moca on Unsplash
Graphics designed by Fuller Studio.

Further reading
Agitation: Step 1 in building a purposeful culture
Inspiration: Step 2 in activating purposeful culture
Exploration: Step 3 in building purposeful culture