Cafe Classic: The Power of the Joy of Work

Editor's Note:  Joy at work? We'll take some of that! Its a good time for Chris Dobyn's Classic reminder that work can be satisfying, often despite the best efforts of management and our reward policies.

Let’s face it, despite what any employer does to try and make the work environment a better place for employees, you’re still asking people to be somewhere other than where they’d probably rather be and to perform work. It’s only going to get just so “good”, no matter what you do. 

One of the Keys . . . Variation

Over the course of several decades, I’ve managed to figure out that employee satisfaction can be enhanced by, among other things, varying people’s assignments periodically.  Fairly recently we had an unusual opportunity in our work unit, that was pretty far afield from our regular portfolio and standard work product.  In support of a conference presentation, we realized we needed to produce an overview video about our organization, with a very short turnaround time. And when we requested assistance from our multimedia department, we received the politely perfunctory (and always irritating) response, “we’re too busy”. 

You Can Go Your Own Way . . .

So, I solicited internally for folks who might be willing to work on this video, and got a handful of takers.  In fairly short order, we developed a storyboard and a script, recorded the narration, edited a soundtrack, and selected a series of video clips and still photos.  Post-production brought all the pieces together in a two minute video suitable for primetime – and was completed in less than five days.  Unfortunately, due to a lack of necessary software, combined with some unique “limitations” of our line of work – most of this video development needed to be conducted at home, and after normal work hours. 

After seeing the finished product, the group that contributed to this effort were totally jazzed, and couldn’t say enough about what a great experience it had been, how they had learned so much about digital video production in such a short period of time. And maybe most importantly, just how much fun it had been working on something that was so different.

You Spoke Too Soon

A week or so later I made the mistake of describing to a long-service federal manager about the great experience we’d had in making the video. At that point, the other manager asked me how I had ensured my employees had been compensated for their time while working on the video. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that asking a federal employee to work on anything uncompensated was a cardinal sin that ranks right up there with practicing witchcraft (bad) or advocating for the abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service (worse). Summoning my courage, I stated that none of my employees had ever even asked to be paid, and that they appeared to have volunteered simply for the “joy of the work.”

The Punchline Follows

That elicited the probably unintentionally scornful response from the other manager that, “our employees aren’t allowed to experience that level of joy from their jobs . . . unless we pay them.”

Thankfully, I managed to suppress my initial reaction, by reminding myself about the strict prohibition against violence in the workplace.

The Epilogue

When I later relayed these comments to the video “narrator”, she responded that, “if she’d had to be paid for doing that, it would have taken all the joy out of the experience.”  A direct quote and sage words indeed. 

After so long in this business, I still find myself surprised by these almost counterintuitive intersections of human behavior and motivation and where any allusion to pay and compensation almost rise to the level of being “dirty words”.

My suspicion is that there’s more than a smidgen of psychology in all of this. The continued challenge is operationalizing that psychology and finding the balance between the work that can be done and the work that must be done. 

Based on the above quote from my fellow manager, it’s maybe no surprise that the federal government still has a ways to go in understanding how people really want to be paid and managed.  More surprising is never to discount the benefits of encouraging employees to take on new experiences that oftentimes can be fun, and reinforce the possibility and the power of the joy of work.  

Everyone probably has a different perspective.  What’s yours?

Chris Dobyns, CCP, CBP, is Manager of the Office of Human Resource Strategies for one of the largest U.S. intelligence agencies. The Office of Human Resource Strategies is responsible for compensation and incentives, occupational structure, recognition and rewards, HR policy, and human capital program evaluation and assessment for his Agency. Chris has worked in the area of compensation for more than 30 years, and has been employed in various compensation-related positions by a number of large, private sector companies including, Sears, Roebuck, Arizona Public Service and Westinghouse Savannah River Company.

Image courtesy of fotolia, "Happy Young Businesswoman" by Rido

Comments

[E. James (Jim) Brennan]

Loved this lesson, Chris! Such predictably irrational behavior (from the great book by Prof. Dan Ariely, founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight) is vitally important to the Total Rewards field.

Behaviors driven by financial or commercial motives (like doing a job) involve different psychological dynamics than behaviors driven by social reasons. Volunteers will fill flood control sandbags for free while rejecting the exact same activity if offered a high hourly rate to do it "as a job". Folks who would refuse an offer of money to change your tire will do it for nothing to help a mom stranded on the roadside with a van full of kids and a flat tire.

All motives are not commercial or financial. Money is not the only consequences of value. Financial income is frequently inferior to psychic income. Hence my meme: "not all rewards jingle."

We ignore such obvious but non-statistical and un-numeric realities about behavioral economics at our peril. There is also another point about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. That could be us!

[Karen Kervick]

I agree with the diversity of duties getting people energized. You lost me when you said you didn't pay them for the "work". Even if volunteering for the out of normal job scope "work", I too would have hedged my bets and paid these employees for their time. Or at least had them take time of to offset the hours worked at home. Otherwise how can you make the comparison for their paid work vs unpaid activities? We all have hobbies we do outside of work, some of which could come into play on the job. Its a gray area, I think, so I would go with who is the end product for? If activity is ultimately on behalf of the company, I would compensate the employee.