How to Motivate Teams That Fear For their Jobs

0:00When someone comes to my door, I know, because I'm using SimpliSafe. I get an alert straight to my phone and I can see, is this someone I should unlock the door for because I know them? Or is it someone I need to tell to get lost? But here's the thing I love most about SimpliSafe. It works when I am not looking at my phone too, because when I'm not keeping an eye out, SimpliSafe is. SimpliSafe is proactive with a double layer of defense that stops crimes before they start. First, AI-powered cameras spot potential threats outside, and then live agents step in, talking to the person through the camera and letting them know they're on video and police will be dispatched if they don't leave.

0:44They can even trigger a loud siren or spotlight. That's how you help stop a crime before it starts. And SimpliSafe makes it easy to use. There are no long-term contracts, no hidden fees. You can cancel at any time. It was named Best Home Security Systems by U.S. News and World Report for five years running. It offers a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it and see the difference for yourself. This month only, take 50 % off any new system. This is one of the best prices you will ever see for SimpliSafe, so don't miss it. Just go to simplisafe.com slash problem solvers. Again, that is SimpliSafe, S-I-M-P-L-I, S-A-F-E, simplisafe.com slash problem solvers and lock in your discount.

1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:59People often talk about the future of work as if it is this interesting academic conversation. What's going to happen? Or as if it's just some bundle of excitement. Oh, we're going to change everything. Down at a practical level, if you are a leader leading a team in a time in which everyone feels like everything is changing, one question is going to dominate all others. And it's this. How do you motivate a team in an era where job security is under threat? And if you want to unpack it, it goes on. In an era where goalposts have melted into shifting sands and in an era where climbing the career ladder, the career path, if you like, of old has now completely disappeared.

2:48So we now have no goalposts. We have a completely changed terrain. How do we keep people motivated? That is a sobering question. Unfortunately, we have someone who is thinking a lot about it. So my name is Mitu Steroni. Mitu's pronounced without the H. Because her first name is spelled M-I-T-H-U. And you want to know that because you're going to want to find her book. So my book is called Hyper Efficient. And my background is I'm a trained physician, an eye surgeon. I've published in neuroscience, various aspects of neuroscience, neurophthalmology, cognitive neuroscience, so on. And at the moment, I advise various corporations and individuals on mental performance, stress, resilience, and just better of mental performance in the workplace and its various forms.

3:39And today, MeToo is joining me to talk about this very heavy, important question. How do you motivate people in a time in which all the things that used to motivate people, or at least that we understood motivated them, have changed or disappeared? What do you do as a leader? And the answer is really fascinating because, as you just heard, MeToo has a science background and comes at this from a real understanding of what motivates people. And today we're gonna get into their heads. We're gonna understand what it is that actually drives performance and drives engagement. It's really interesting.

4:16It's really nuanced. It's really possible. And it's all coming up after the break. All right, we're back. I am talking with Me Too Steroni about this very big question. How do you motivate a team in an era where job security is under threat. We're going to dig deep into not just how teams operate, but the way the people on those teams think. And before we get there, let's zoom out so that you can hear Me Too talk about how she approaches this question in the first place. Because it really comes from a foundational question about why we even work the way that we do. The words stress and burnout and performance are increasingly becoming more prevalent in corporate discussions and in discussions of the workplace.

5:08And I realized that, okay, surely we are not all working necessarily harder than we ever have done before. What is it about work that's predisposing us to suffer all these things and talk about these things here and now, given we've been through bigger changes in the workplace before. And then I decided to take a look at how we work and realize that actually we've never really changed how we work in terms of how we view productivity and efficiency ever since the era of 4D and assembly lines. That created a mold and every template of work has since been molded to that original mold. So we now carry on working in that way.

5:54And then I realized that now that so much work is moving from the hands to the head. It's not that it just started moving. It actually started moving after the Second World War. But right now, because of technology, so much of it is moving to the head that we are working with our brains, with our minds to such an extensive level that we are not monitoring whether the way we are working is actually any good. we don't have the economy and the career arcs and expectations that we did, I don't know, one, certainly two generations ago, where people might show up and stay in a company for their entire careers, or at least stay as long as they wanted because they felt some level of job security.

6:42Now everything is changing, and it is changing rapidly. And job holders know this. They know, that if they take a job, they might be there for only a short period of time. It has been drilled into them. This is not a family. You are at will. You could be thrown out on the street at any time and they act like it. Now, this is a problem for managers because managers need to motivate a team. They need to create a feeling of coherence and shared vision and shared values. And how do you do that when everybody is looking one foot out the door because they know that might be where they're headed. It requires a different way of thinking about what we're doing there and how to create a new story and a new coherence and a new sense of shared values and goals.

7:35At least that's my hypothesis. But you know better. Tell me what we're looking at. New culture and new values and new goals, these are great ideas. I think one way to look at the situation is as in the following way. We think about people, when we think about people staying at a workplace or we think about attracting a good workforce, attracting a good employee. What are we trying to do? We're trying to motivate them to come and work with us. We're trying to motivate them with a goal of the, first of all, with very basics, so job security, financial incentives, but also with possibly a higher goal of where do we envisage our company going, what is our culture, and so on and so forth.

8:19Now, when we do this, when we use extrinsic motivators like this, so job security is an extrinsic motivator, salary, career progression, these are all extrinsic motivators. the first thing we have to remember is that extrinsic motivators can cancel each other out. So if you are tempting workers with these things, but there are other workplaces and there's a great choice in the way we work and lots of other workplaces have different equally attractive cultures, how do you out-compete those others to retain your staff or to attract really talented employees towards your organization extrinsic motivators cancel each other out but if we now zoom in to what's actually happening right now here and now we're in a landscape work landscape that is suffering from quite extensive disruption we have ai we have automation people aren't required to reskill or learn on the job very rapidly there are very few organizations at the moment that do not have some form of AI learning carrying on within them.

9:37And this form of learning is now no longer going to become an exception, it will become a norm. So whatever your role is at the moment, chances are you will have to increase your skills, you may even have to reskill. And as a leader, this is what you would expect from members of your team. So you can no longer guarantee that the role someone is being invited into is going to be a protected role and will carry on for the foreseeable future. Disruption also means that because of re-skilling and because of shifting sands, any goals that you have as an organization, any goals that your team members are working towards can very quickly change.

10:21So if tomorrow a new learning LLM comes out, that carries out the precise work that you are doing, your road is immediately placed under threat. Would you want to join an organization where that can happen? The temptation, the motivation has to be great. So how do we overcome all of this? I would suggest taking a step back and no longer using the kind of typical extrinsic motivators that organizations have used all this time. So rather than using a carrot or a stick in the form of threatening a job loss or tempting someone with a financial incentive, I suggest using what is known as intrinsic motivation.

11:07So intrinsic motivation is when it's a very rare, it's quite a difficult thing to create. Right. Recent data, recent research suggests there are actually some very simple ways in which we can shape a workforce or shape a workplace so that team members actually feel intrinsically motivated within it. And once you define, yeah, can you define intrinsic motivation? So intrinsic motivation is when you feel really good doing whatever you're doing for its own sake. For instance, if you have to suddenly learn an LLM for a project you're working on, extrinsic motivation is knowing that, okay, once you learn this, you will get a, you're guaranteed the project, your job will be secure, or you will get some kind of financial incentive.

12:05Intrinsic motivation is learning simply because the action of learning just feels so pleasurable. So you're learning even if the goal of learning this LLM disappears tomorrow. So the pleasure of learning is so great that you learn for its own sake. And even if you have to reskill tomorrow, learn a new skill tomorrow, discard this the day after tomorrow, you still feel incredibly motivated to carry on because you're just enjoying the action from within. But I would imagine there are a lot of people who would say either, that does not describe me. I don't want to be learning a new thing all the time.

12:50That doesn't sound fun. You're saying to find the joy in that, but I don't know that I can find the joy in that. Or I could imagine a manager saying, yeah, that makes sense in theory. I bet that there are some people on my team who are just joyful, constant learners, but not everyone on my team. If you're telling me to stop trying to motivate them with external motivations, which is what they're familiar with, either the carrot or the stick, and instead motivate them with the joy of learning, that sounds, I think that a lot of my employees are going to say that's pretty empty. What are your responses to that?

13:24As you've just described it, it does indeed sound empty because the idea is not to motivate people with the joy of learning. So what we know is that, and recent research in Paris by Oudayer and Kaplan have discovered this, is that the ability to make someone really enjoy their work for the sake of it has always been notoriously difficult, whether it's learning, whether it's doing something else. But what we do know now is that we can create, by some very strategic pushes and pulls a situation where the process immediately starts feeling pleasurable. And the secret here is to give team members the opportunity or to put team members in a situation where they are making rapid progress in something all the time.

14:19and what I mean by that is if you are learning if you have a team and you are delegating projects to everyone a task or a task within a project to everyone then of course some people are going to be great at it some people are going to not be happy with what they're delegated other people will be somewhere in the middle but learning progress the process of creating joy in what you're doing comes from being able to work on something in which you make really rapid and ongoing progress. So ideally, the way you achieve this is by when you're delegating tasks, you will be matching skills with the kind of task you're delegating.

15:10You're going to So keep reassessing your team members to see whether everyone in the team is really making progress. You're not assessing simply achievement. So box ticking, you're looking at whether people are actually making progress. And you are, whenever you're delegating tasks or working on a project, you are sharing the project out in a way that people are most likely, team members are most likely to be best matched for something in which they are going to be making rapid progress. Now, even if that is not possible, creating a culture where every team member has the opportunity to make rapid progress at something for a certain portion of their working week can also achieve the same objective.

16:02Now, the reason why this is so important is because as soon as you or a team member starts working on something, in this way and is rapidly making progress in acquiring a skill or solving a problem or learning something. And again, this doesn't have to be just learning specific. It can involve skill acquisition. It can also just involve completing a project. If people feel, get to experience that feeling at regular intervals during the week, ideally during the day, then that feeling creates a sense of intrinsic motivation that translates to everything else. And that feeling, that pleasure is actually far more enduring and far stronger than carrot or stick incentives.

16:58Yeah, that makes sense to me because carrot and stick incentives are, first of all, quite slow. I'm not always going to get the carrot and the stick can loom over me for a long time. So it is otherwise a fairly static experience. I show up, I do a thing, and then I just keep doing the thing. I may not feel any sense of progress. It's just flat. And although a second ago, I was reading this as the joy of learning and you're like, no, it's not exactly that. It's actually the joy of progress. That is true. People do love progress. Can you take that, which sounds really interesting, but also abstract and use it as the bones of something.

17:34Give me an example from a company that has done this. What are tasks that someone can experience a kind of rapid progress in? This directly goes back to what are people, what do people consider themselves skilled at? So when you have a team, assuming your work, so it depends on what your focus is on your team, if you're a very specialized team or not. But really, there are a

18:04member of your team working on a project, and when you're delegating a task, try to see whether the task you're delegating to that particular team member is actually a good match for the skill set. And even if it is not, when you are assigning or delegating tasks or projects, what we tend to do is we tend to say, okay, we are delegating fairly based on what they have on their plate already. A different way of looking at it is to see, okay, what are people likely to make really good progress in rather than simply complete? And if you take that kind of an angle when you're delegating tasks, so for instance, you could have five people in your team and you have a task that is perfectly suited to an engineer, but you have two other members of your team who actually have other skill sets and are likely to make much more rapid progress, you would delegate it to them.

19:05Or if you have an engineer who's already got a lot on their plate and another task comes up that someone else could be doing because they don't have a lot on their plate, you would still give it to the person with a lot on their plate because they are likely to make the most rapid progress on this simply because of the skill match or because they have any pre-existing talent on this. The idea here is to create a situation when anyone is at work, when any team member is at work, where the team member feels that their presence, through their presence and through their skill set, they have agency over making progress.

19:47They're using their skills to make progress, not simply to achieve and stop, but to afford change, to conquer the project or the task in a rapidly progressing way. So rather than doing lots of small fragmented things, you are doing something, you're giving a task or a series of tasks that appear continuous as well. That's another way of looking at it. And really the idea is to zero in on progress rather than simply tasks. So in other words, some of this is about creating a narrative experience for somebody. That was an interesting thing that you had said. And again, if you have, if there's anything that you could draw from a company or kind of help us see it in like a real world example, that'd be really helpful.

20:33But what you're describing is it's shifting from delegating things based on simply who could just get things done or workload to how does this fit into the individual workers experience here. And progress is both progress for the project, an ongoing project, but also I suppose progress is someone feeling like they are getting better and better at something. Am I right? Correct. So it's really, it's the feeling that someone is, as an individual, getting better and better. But that improvement, as you say, follows a continuous narrative that almost doesn't end. You know what the ending would feel like, but you don't feel that it is ending.

21:18So every day when you return to your work, you feel that you are continually progressing along that continuous narrative. And it doesn't have to be simply learning. It can be working to complete a task. It can be working on a project, but it's really the continuity of progress that is important. And that is what seems to inspire a feeling of pleasure in the work to a far greater extent than working on an isolated thing that then leads to a single award, single reward or single carrot. So this attitude of progressing is one that we will need to do And I think there's another angle to this, which is that at this moment, change and disruption require people to make progress in terms of because the landscape is so unpredictable for so many workers across so many companies.

22:25feeling pleasure and feeling confidence in progress is actually far more potent than feeling confident that this is the path I'm going to take these are the projects that lie ahead of me they're definitely they definitely lie ahead of me and I will be making progress across them reaching some kind of a goal that sort of view is now no longer there because the future is so uncertain and so disrupted. Garnering pleasure from progress and focusing on progress rather than absolute goals and achievement is a better way to handle this kind of work landscape. Super interesting. Here's what it makes me think.

23:07You had said in the beginning that we have not really changed the way in which we work since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And I had been thinking about what fundamental change in work are you calling for here? And what had occurred to me, and I want to put it to you to see if you agree or disagree or whatever, is that this idea of shifting the incentives and thinking about people's experience of progress isn't necessarily just about understanding how people think and therefore customizing the work experience to that, but it's also about everything else that would be required in order for this to actually be put into practice.

24:03Because you can't just snap your fingers and start to work this way. For a manager to be thinking about assigning tasks based on people's experience of progress is for a manager to start having very different conversations with their employees. You have to understand your employees' experience at a very different level than we do right now. You also have to be tracking it or paying attention to it or otherwise more deeply engaged in the employee's experience and in the system that you've built and the dynamics of the team that you've built for you to be able to execute the kind of thing that you're describing.

24:45And then it also requires a different way of understanding when and how things get done and having some tolerance for things being done maybe a little bit differently or a little bit slower than ways they might not have been done before. Slower, I'm saying, because you're saying if that That person who's already got a lot on their plate would also get the most sort of sense of progress, the most intrinsic motivation out of this. Then you give it to them, even if there's someone else who has less on their plate. So that requires a tolerance at an organizational level for things to move at a different clip.

25:20And all of which is to say that what you're really calling for is not just this kind of change, but rather the ripple effects and the systems that you would have to think through about how to actually implement that. Am I right? You're right. And I would say that I've shared with you the principle of what we're aiming for. But on a practical level, an organization can implement this in three different ways. It's, of course, unthinkable to do this suddenly overnight for every individual. So there are different gradations of doing it. The loosest gradation is really one that Google did and 3M did, which is give employees 20 % of their time to pursue something that sparks interest in themselves as individuals.

26:07So they can just go off and spend a Friday doing whatever they find interesting, even if it's completely irrelevant to the project they're working on. And just doing that for one day a week can create the mindset to motivate people on for the rest of the time. It also creates, just sorry, just to add, it also can create great value for your company. Famously, you mentioned 3M, famously the Post-it note came out of exactly this project. And Google Mail came out of Google's 20 % rule project. Exactly. And so the idea is really, this is the principle we should be using. And depending on the size of your organization and the organization itself, you can implement this at different levels.

26:50So if you have no chance of implementing it as and where you are, try the Google approach, try the 3M approach. And other companies have used it to a lesser degree, depending on their flexibility. Next level of doing it is if you do have a little bit of flexibility, then when you are assigning projects, say you're a small startup and you have people with diverse talents, then you will have a little more flexibility in terms of whom you are assigning which project to, which task to. And there, tailoring the projects for individual kind of talents and skills is important. But also, the emphasis should be on constantly reassessing and checking on progress and shuffling tasks around to make sure everyone is making maximal progress rather than simply performing on the task.

27:43So that's at the second level of doing it. A third level of doing it is actually quite separate from the other two, which is the idea of, again, you would need some flexibility for this, is gamification of the workplace, which is now becoming more and more embraced and people are thinking about it more and more. I know Amazon has the opportunity to gamify its workplace in certain settings and they are doing it. Gamification really means that you turn as many aspects of the task or the workplace generally into a game where the consequences of exploration are not punished within certain boundaries.

28:26You can think about it during, you can sort of, it's sort of an extension of the Google's 20 % rule where you just explore things without getting punished. Other aspects of gamification include kind of creating a fun game out of it so you can measure progress. So very often when you are in the midst of a typical workday or a particular task, there is no obvious sign of progress. There's no obvious feedback signal to the individual themselves that I am really progressing in this. I'm walking up the path. I can follow the steps that I'm making. There are, of course, things like box ticking and discretionary targets, but they don't always correlate with the individual perception of progress.

29:12So one way you can do this is through gamification is by creating boards, creating little landmarks and little points which are artificial with regard to the actual task, but that create a perception in the individual that they are making constant and consistent progress towards an end. And that creates a sort of a perception of progressing through a board game or progressing through any other kind of game. And even if there isn't actual progress taking place, it creates a perception of it, which again, puts people into the right mental state. Right. I can see. And then they can see the progress, which is especially helpful if that's not a way in which people are usually thinking about work.

29:56It's super interesting. Can you, as a final thought here, tell me what it has been like as you work with organizations and start having conversations about this? So the biggest change I've observed is before and after the pandemic, where before the pandemic, there was, of course, competition attrition were always present. But it's really since the pandemic that also with the conversation around working from home or hybrid working, the choice of remote work. All of these issues have now entered the conversation and it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to prevent attrition, to hold on to talented members simply through things like financial incentives or a temporary guarantee in a role because there is so much disruption present.

30:52So organizations are now thinking and considering and trying to take the extra step to make the workplace experience itself pleasurable so that people feel they don't just have to be at work. They actually want to be at work simply for the fun of it, for the pleasure of it. Oh, that's great. How can people learn more about you and get the book? Thank you. So I'm on LinkedIn. My website is www.metousteroni.com and the book is available through most booksellers. Awesome. Me too. Thanks so much. This is so interesting. Thank you so much for having me. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved.