Why Workplace Autonomy Is the Way of the Future
This came across my desk…it ties in brilliantly with this article How to get people to say Yes! to Leadership…
Edited excerpt from Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/146457/
A little past noon, only a third of CEO Jeff Gunther’s employees have shown up for work. But Gunther — entrepreneur, manager, capitalist — is neither worried nor annoyed. Maybe that’s because he didn’t roll into the office himself until about an hour ago. Or maybe that’s because he knows his crew isn’t shirking. They’re working — just on their own terms.
Gunther has turned (his) company, which creates computer software and hardware to help hospitals integrate their information systems, into a ROWE — a results-only work environment. In a ROWE workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time — or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done.
This appealed to Gunther, who’s in his early thirties. “Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. “It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work.” As (his company) expanded, and as Gunther began exploring new office space, he announced, that for the first 90 days of the new year (2008), the entire 22-person operation would become a ROWE (experiment).
“In the beginning, people didn’t take to it,” Gunther says. The office filled up around 9 a.m. and emptied out in the early evening, just as before, but after a few weeks, most people found their groove. Productivity rose. Stress declined. And although two employees left, by the end of the test period Gunther decided to go with ROWE permanently.
The team was accomplishing more under this new arrangement. They were focused on the work itself rather than on whether someone would call them slackers for leaving at 3 p.m. to watch a daughter’s soccer game. “For his people (all high level creative work), it’s all about the craftsmanship. And they need a lot of autonomy.”
People still had specific goals they had to reach. If they needed help, Gunther was there to assist. But he decided against tying those goals to compensation. “That creates a culture that says it’s all about money and not enough about the work.” Money, he believes, is only a “threshold motivator.” People must be paid well and be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don’t much affect performance and motivation. Indeed, Gunther thinks that the freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise; employee’s spouses, partners and families are among a ROWE’s (strongest) advocates.
“For me, it’s a partnership between me and the employees. They’re not resources. They’re partners.” And partners need to direct their own lives. “Management” is something that humans invented. Management is a technology. And like Motivation 2.0, it’s a technology that has grown creaky. Its core, management hasn’t changed much in 100 years. Its central ethic remains control; its chief tools remain (external) motivators. That leaves it largely out of sync with the non-routine, right-brained abilities on which many of the world’s economies now depend. But could its most glaring weakness run deeper?
Management presumes that to take action or move forward, we need a prod — that absent a reward or punishment, we’d remain happily and inertly in place. It also presumes that once people do get moving, they need direction — that without a firm and reliable guide, they’d wander.
Are we wired to be passive and inert? Or are we wired to be active and engaged? I’m convinced it’s the latter.
Submerging part of our nature in the name of economic survival can be a sensible move. My ancestors did it; so did yours. And there are times, even now, when we have no other choice. But today economic accomplishment depends not on keeping our nature submerged but on allowing it to surface. It requires resisting the temptation to control people; and instead doing everything we can to reawaken their deep-seated sense of autonomy.
The fundamentally autonomous quality of human nature is central to self-determination theory (SDT) which cites autonomy as one of three basic human needs. (The other two are the need for competence and the need for relatedness.) And of the three, it’s the most important. ”Autonomy, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice — which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.
Autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and, in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout and greater psychological well-being. Researchers found greater job satisfaction among employees whose bosses offered “autonomous support.” These bosses saw issues from the employee’s point of view, gave meaningful feedback and information, provided ample choice over what to do and how to do it and encouraged employees to take on new projects leading to higher performance on the job. In a research study, businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had (only) one-third the employee turnover.
Consider the very notion of “empowerment.” It presumes that the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the waiting bowls of grateful employees. But that’s not autonomy, but rather a slightly more civilized form of control.
Take management’s embrace of “flex time.” Flexibility simply widens the fences and occasionally opens the gates. It, too, is little more than control in disguise. Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word “management” onto the linguistic ash heap.” This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.
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You wouldn’t believe it but I have wasted all day digging for some content articles about this. You’re a lifesaver, it was an excellent study and has helped me out to no end. Cheers,