Designing work to make employees feel more autonomous and masterful
Feeling that your decisions directly impact how you perform your work is intrinsically motivating to everyone. As enterprises grow every employee and contractor’s work becomes more interdependent and constrained by the work of others to the point where every movement is proscribed for some assembly-line workers.
Productive autonomy
People feel autonomous when they can make decisions for themselves about how to live their lives and do their work. Productivity derives from how effective every work-related action is at creating value for a customer. The work output of one group is often the work input of another, how integrated and synchronized workflow is between groups directly impacts productivity and quality. How a founder leads her/him/themself and others in designing work that is both productive and autonomous directly impacts the motivation of the team and the culture of the enterprise they build.
People feel autonomous relative to the constraints they feel in different dimensions of their lives. Here are some of the dimensions:
Flexibility of work hours
Flexibility of work location
Flexibility in which work is assigned
Flexibility in who you are assigned to work with
Flexibility in asking for and receiving help
Flexibility in how the work is performed to achieve quality and quantity standards
Understanding how the quality and productivity of the work performed relate to someone’s ability to make more money and get promoted
A key to generally motivating people to feel good about their work is to give them some flexibility in how they perform their work and let them know it. Plus, give them an understanding of how their work creates value for the enterprise.
In not-so-ancient times, many manufacturing businesses—like pottery-making—were loose associations of people that would show up when they wanted, evaluated what work was available in which area, and then decide if they wanted to sign-in to work and get paid that day. Today, that flexibility for anyone other than the founder or professionals working for an enterprise that pays people solely on the business they bring in, would create chaos.
Mastery and autonomy are related
Employees skilled in tasks that create value in the organization are valuable in providing ideas that improve the methods used to organize and perform their tasks. It is good practice to let workers with similar tasks have an opportunity to discuss and experiment with ways to make their work more productive. It is also good practice for members of teams whose work products interact with one another to meet to discuss and experiment how to improve how their work-product moves between teams. If you contract out work or service support, you want to know that your contractor lets their workforce have some autonomy to organize their work and master their craft; if not, they will suffer high turnover and lapses in quality.
In general, people master skills through practice directed by experienced and empathetic coaches. You want your team to get better at their tasks so you want to provide them the resources to be better at their jobs and to design their own workflows. You also want to let your ambitious team members know how being good at their jobs can enable them to advance—you’ll lose your ambitious employees if you do not.
A note about using “being too busy” as an excuse
Unless you and your team are in a crisis, you cannot use “we are too busy to help you improve” as an excuse. Improvement needs to be part of how work is designed and not as something that it done “in our spare time.”