The Provision of Meaning in the Workplace: to What Extent are We Responsible for Our Own Performance?

It's Monday morning. Sleep grips you tightly in it's heady grasp - the pull of dreams like mighty anchors holding you steadfast beneath a distant surface of waking thoughts. An alarm blares, barely cutting through the mire, bringing with it only awareness of your debilitating lethargy. With effort, you manage to force open a crack in the barricade of your eyelids. No hint of sunlight yet grazes the mirrored darkness of the room. A lazy thought slowly breaches from the depths of your subconscious - "rain". It pounds steadily against the window pane, a dreary drumbeat of sullen promises. More idle thoughts swim into view - "work", "commute", "office", "deadline". You're sure that the blessed purgatory of sleep has never beckoned quite this seductively before. Isn't it time to just give in to its sweet call?

OK, it may be a little over dramatic - but I think this paints a somewhat familiar picture for a lot of us. We all have days where the last thing we want to do is to jump out of bed and straight into the stiff and unwelcoming arms of our day jobs. Whilst it may be inevitable that we won't always perform at our best, we're often very quick to blame ourselves - should have gotten more sleep; should have done some more preparation; should definitely not have had that last beer... But what if we're too quick? As painfully, and at times annoyingly, fallible human beings, shouldn't we be placing more accountability for our performance upon the organisations that demand, but ultimately benefit from us performing at our peak? And what really causes the difference between days such as the one described above and days where the opposite is true, where we bound out of bed, thrilled at the prospect of getting stuck into some lovely, lovely work?

Join me as we discuss these and other equally drawn-out questions about the nature of workplace performance - and hopefully we'll discover something of the extent of the responsibility our workplaces have in determining just how well we're able to perform...

Work is No Joke

"The Simplest way to earn a living and provide for ourselves and our families is to get a job."

We don't work for the fun of it. Well, some of us do - or at least certainly like to think that we do. But fundamentally, in the majority of cases the need to work is driven by just that - necessity. In the world we live in, the simplest (if perhaps not the most effective) way to earn a living and provide for ourselves and our families is to get a job. Now, I'm not here to argue whether that in of itself is right or wrong, good or bad - or whether or not we could design a system better able to cater for our basic human needs - but simply to state the truth of the situation. We all pretty much have to work.

Given that work is a practical necessity for most, it follows that we work. So that explains, at the very core of it, why we work. There is a distinct lack of choice that exists for the majority of people. What we do have a choice over though is our profession and we are fortunate in this modern world that we have quite the abundance of choice that we do when it comes to settling on a particular vocation. Essentially though, whatever it is, it is still work and it is still driven, ultimately, by necessity.

This fact alone should give us all some respite from the tireless self-derision we're prone to shackling ourselves with when it comes to judging our own performance. After all, I don't think any of us would expect many people to be able to consistently find the motivation needed to reach the peaks of their performance when they've spent the majority of their life backed into a corner they were unable to get out of - whether they were fully aware of this fact or not. Of course the problem is that a lot of us simply are unaware of this fact, institutionalised as we are by the realities of the society of today. Plus, we are constantly forced to compare ourselves to other people. And other people can be really annoying.

"society depends on collaboration and collectivism [...] - you get out what you put in."

This is not to say that there aren't good reasons behind the current societal operating model. Work is beneficial to society as a whole, as society depends on collaboration and collectivism - and the model we have today is fair enough, certainly at a high level, in that it essentially stipulates and ensures the continuation of collaboration through the provision of meaningful, functional rewards (money!). You get out what you put in. Whether or not this holds true in all cases, or can be said for all members of society - or whether it is even the 'right' model at all - is certainly a contentious debate, but it's a contentious debate that we must save for another time...

Really for us, the question is whether or not these purely financial rewards with which we are all compensated for performing work are in and of themselves enough to stimulate solid and continuous performance. And, what is performance and why should we care about it anyway?

Money Makes the World go Round

"the companies able to grow the most effectively and efficiently are the ones that are best able to manage their own financial reinvestment."

We've already discussed that society requires the constant reinvestment of our time and resources in order for it to grow and thrive. As constituent parts of society, it's also the case that the organisations within it function in exactly the same way. Studies have often shown that the companies able to grow the most effectively and efficiently are the ones that are best able to manage their own financial reinvestment. Take Amazon for example, which reinvested much of the revenue stream generated by its retail business in order to grow its web services business, Amazon Web Services, or AWS. Whilst you may not be so familiar with AWS, you will no doubt be aware of the success of Amazon - and therefore you shouldn't be too surprised to learn that this particular arm of the business is now responsible for generating more than half of Amazon's operating income.

A thought experiment: what would happen if we were to apply a similar model to our more fleshy and perhaps slightly less reliable resources - people? Imagine first of all that each worker represents a sort of numerical 'performance value' to an organisation. Each individual worker has a different total performance value that they can add at a given time - and the exact value can fluctuate week-by-week, or even day-by-day. The more experienced employees will most likely be able to more often provide a higher performance value to the business than the less experienced employees - but each of them represents a fixed value at any given time.

Organisations need their employees to 'spend' their performance value in a couple of different ways - but most prominently, they need them to spend it on outward facing products or services. This is what the organisation 'sells' and how it stays profitable as a business. The organisation also needs them to spend some of their value on inward facing products and services, to help grow the business from the inside out and prepare it for the next level of business. Of course, they don't want their workers to spend too much value internally, or the quality of the products and services will take a hit - but equally, they don't want them to not spend any at all or they won't be able to reinvest in any growth initiatives. This is exactly like the reinvestment of finances, something we've already discussed as being pretty much essential for any business looking to achieve effective and sustainable growth.

So as with most things in life, a balance of sorts is required. But let's now think about how we could make this easier for ourselves. What's the most effective way to ensure that we can reinvest more of our people's value into our own organisations without risking a hit to the quality of our external products and services? Well, the answer is simple - increase the total value each person can spend. This way, each of our employees can afford to spend more on us as an organisation without spending any less on our products and services. And ideally, they should be able to spend more on both! How can we do this? Do read on...

Employee Performance Value

"at any time within an individual's career, there exists an upper limit to their performance value."

Hopefully by now, it is starting to become clear as to why it is within an organisation's best interests to invest in and figure out how to increase their workers' overall performance value. I'm acutely aware that I have just promised to answer the question of how to do this, but before I do, we first need to explore the performance value concept in a little more detail. So let's take our financial metaphor one step further and introduce a performance value 'model'. This is a purely hypothetical model that I have created, designed and illustrated to help us better understand what exactly it is we mean when we talk about performance value and how it can be affected.

The model can roughly be explained by the following principle: at any time within an individual's career, there exists an upper limit to their performance value. This represents the individual operating at the highest possible level that their current experience allows for. The upper limit itself is roughly proportional to the individual's experience; to increase the upper limit requires the input of many, what we will call, 'experiential factors'. An 'experiential factor' represents anything that increases an individual's experience - such as training, project exposure, mentors, responsibility etc. Each employee also has a theoretical, what we will call, 'maximum performance value average potential'. The 'maximum performance value average potential' represents the peak level of average performance that an individual person is capable of, after exposure to all existing experiential factor inputs. It becomes exponentially harder to reach the closer you get to it because it becomes that much harder to gain additional, meaningful experiential factors, the more that you have already been exposed to. It exists as a limit because one person is only ever capable of so much. See the figure below for a somewhat simplified graphic, representative of this model.

Of course, this particular graphic represents just one individual. You could keep all the experiential factors at your disposal fixed for multiple individuals - same career paths, same training, same mentors, etc. - and still end up with a different looking graph for each one of them. This is just to say that we are all unique. However, if we consider just the one individual as the 'general' individual, and alter the experiential factors this general individual is exposed to, we will find that we can have a significant impact on the overall trend of the graph. If we expose the individual to less experiential factors, we lower their overall 'performance value capacity' - or the area under the upper limit curve - over the course of their career. If we expose them to more, we increase it. See the figure below for an illustration of this. It is clearly important then to ensure that we provide as many experiential factors as possible for our employees, to subsequently ensure that the amount of performance value possible for our employees to output at any given time is higher - and that it increases as much as possible over time. This gives us more theoretical performance value to play with.

But what does the actual performance value output for an individual look like? At any given time, you could plot a point on the graph within the performance value capacity range to represent an individual's current performance value. Join up the dots and you would get something like the blue line in figure 3 - up and down, but generally matching the upward trend of the performance value upper limit, or available maximum. This 'actual performance value' is affected by many things - such as life events or day-to-day stresses - so we see some pretty wild variations here. A more useful measure would result if we were to draw a line of best fit, or plot the 'average performance value', over this - see the green line in figure 3. This shows us the overall performance value average which we can easily compare to the upper limit over time. Ideally, we want to get this line to stay as close to the upper limit as possible to ensure that we are getting the maximum available performance value out of this individual at all times. In fact, the grey bars above the green line in figure 3 represent all of the untapped performance value potential that we've lost out on in the case of the individual that this graphic represents.

I know. That was a lot. But hopefully my digression into this somewhat complex realm of graphics and charts was as fun for you as it was for me (the wild physicist within is sometimes just too strong for me to control...). This should though have provided you with a useful visual reference from which to frame our discussion about maximising performance.

So what's the point of it all? Well, the point that I've been meandering up to in a rather protracted and decidedly long-winded fashion is: that there is in fact a difference between increasing the upper limit of possible performance value, through training and other experiential factors (or on an organisational level, by bringing in more experienced individuals); and unlocking the wasted, available performance of existing individuals day-by-day. If that makes sense. And so we finally arrive at the heart of the topic of this article, and the question that I have so long promised but ultimately failed, as yet, to answer - how do we actually go about doing this?

Needs Must

"Why should an organisation start to even consider assuming responsibility for something that is ultimately, completely out of its control?"

Before I do though... (I know, the anticipation is nearly incapacitating, just breathe through it) I simply must address some of the additional concerns I feel sure to be currently occupying your attention and thus preventing you from being able to continue on reading this article with any seriousness. Surely, you ask, how hard someone is going to work, or how well they're going to perform, isn't really down to an organisation, but to the individual themselves? Why should an organisation start to even consider assuming responsibility for something that is ultimately, completely out of its control? Well, there exists an excellent psychological theory of motivation that I shall now draw upon to attempt to explain why it is that organisations might have more control over this than they think. I'm sure most of you will be familiar with it.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a five-tier model of needs, often depicted as a pyramid, that explains the order in which different types of needs must be met. Needs higher up the pyramid cannot be attended to until needs further down have been fully satisfied. As human beings, we are hard-wired from a survival perspective to prioritise our needs in this way. Until our basic needs have been met, we cannot with any real focus or dedication look to address our psychological needs, or indeed self-fulfillment needs, as - so the theory goes - this could leave us open to more serious physical or indeed life-threatening situations.

"the only way a person can be fully motivated to pursue self-fulfillment activities with any real dedication or passion, thereby increasing performance value in so doing, is if all other more basic needs are simultaneously being met."

As such, it is extremely difficult for people to focus on things that aren't geared at satisfying their currently pressing needs. What we use to measure an individual's 'performance value' is often the quality of outputs resultant from need fulfillments that lie towards the top of the pyramid - such as creative pursuits and activities. The pyramid suggests though, that the only way a person can be fully motivated to pursue such self-fulfillment activities with any real dedication or passion, thereby increasing performance value in so doing, is if all other more basic needs are simultaneously being met. So it follows that if organisations really want any of us to provide them with more and higher quality upper-needs-generated output, then they better make damn sure that they're fulfilling all of our more basic needs below.

This is actually the crux of the answer to the question of how to maximise an individual's performance. Make sure that enough of their needs are being met to enable them to self-actualise and willingly, if sub-consciously, up their own ante. But we must ask the same question again: how do organisations actually go about doing this? Well, beyond providing workers with the money, safety, security and inclusive culture required to satisfy their more basic needs, all of which are challenges in and of themselves (but are things that organisations are steadily getting pretty proficient at providing and are themselves the topics of future blogs!), they also need to meet workers' so called 'Esteem' and 'Self-Actualisation' needs through:

The Provision of Meaning

We have arrived. Let's take a moment to recap. So far we have talked about the underlying nature of work and how it is ultimately an activity we have no choice but to partake in. We have discussed the importance of organisations, and indeed 'work' in general, and about how integral organisations are for the upkeep and overall continuation of a successful society. We have more widely explored the concept of reinvestment, both in a financial and performance related sense, complete with hypothetical graphical models and a smattering of jargon for good measure, to try to understand exactly why unlocking performance value really matters. And finally, we have discussed the role of organisations in determining available employee performance and indeed, in unlocking it. So all that's left to discuss, is how it can be done.

"A person will be extremely motivated to be a part of something, the purpose of which they truly believe in."

A purpose that is bigger than ourselves. Self-actualisation requires that we acknowledge the passing insignificance of our own lives - and so strive to be part of something that transcends it. This can be done in many ways, but one such way is by being part of a business that, through collaboration and innovation, is able to change the way the world was and by doing so, leave a lasting legacy. Therefore, first and foremost you have to ensure that your organisation has a purpose that's for one, clear and for two, bigger than simply being about increasing profits, or growing for growth's sake. Simply ensuring the survival of your organisation is not enough of a purpose for most people at all levels to really buy in to.

Secondly, at a macro level, as an organisation you have to make sure that your raison d'être is in line with the passions and desires of your employees. A purpose is a very personal thing, and when one considers one's legacy, it isn't simply enough to just have one - it must be something that reflects one as an individual and speaks to the specific nature of one's existence. A person will be extremely motivated to be a part of something, the purpose of which they truly believe in. You can do this by simply asking your employees what they think the purpose of your business is and then whether or not it's in line with what they think it should be. Does the business need to change tack? Has the business hired the right people to get it to where you, the business leader, thinks it should be going? Have you learned something from your employees that you hadn't thought of before?

Thirdly, you can look to the micro-level, and how to ensure that your employees can tap into this sense of meaning and purpose in their day-to-day activities. Giving people autonomy and choice over what they do is an excellent way to ensure you get the right people in the right seats. Rather than always being prescriptive in assignments, invite people to join projects that have real meaning to them. Encourage your workforce to identify issues and areas for improvement that they have a real passion for and then enable them to fix them. Demonstrate trust and loyalty to your employees and they will repay you in spades.

Not only will these approaches be extremely effective for getting the most out of your current workforce, but they will enable you to capture the attention of the wider market. The war for talent cannot be won through the provision of material goods, because if you can offer it, someone else probably can - and then some. But the talent will come to you if you can give them what they truly need - the opportunity to transcend their own existence, build a legacy they can be proud of and a live a life of fortitude. All through the provision of meaning.

In Summary

I suppose that the only really pressing question we have left to address is the one from the title. To what extent are we responsible for our own performance? Well, I will say just this: we all have ultimate responsibility for our own performance - but we must be enabled to unlock the true extent of it. We ourselves are not often aware of the limits of our own performance potential and so it is up to the organisations that we work for to help us discover and unleash it. How do they do this? By providing us with meaning in our work and the opportunities to thrive that we truly desire above all else.

I'll leave you with this one thought: we all have a single anxiety that underpins all others in this life. The fear that, ultimately, we are wasting it. So many times we have heard stories of men and women that came before who have all gone to their graves with songs still unwritten, books still unpublished and hearts still half-empty. We have a moral duty that transcends simply unlocking performance potential to bring about a Copernican revolution in how we orient our approach to work and business - as being focused on meaning rather than material goods. Our lives are too intertwined with work to any longer settle for a "balance" between the two. We need proper integration of work and life, that admits to the fact that work is life, rather than a small, insignificant segment of it. It simply isn't true - and neither is it true that you can't be fully alive whilst working. If you can provide an individual with meaning, with purpose in what they do in their work for you as an organisation, then it stops becoming work. It starts becoming life. And all we all really want to do in life, is to live it.

Does any of this ring true for you? To what extent do you think you're responsible for your own performance in the workplace? Let me know your thoughts in the comments! Thanks for reading.

Catch you next time. Matt.