How Covid-19 changes Employees' Intrinsic Motivation
We’ve read many articles telling us how the world of work is going to change post-Covid. Painting visions of more remote work, living more with nature, in a deeper state of wellbeing, balancing life more gently, while still being able to engage in meaningful work. A thoughtful article I’ve just read had the opposite take: inertia is going to take us right back to the same frenetic pace of life and way of working in place before Covid. Maybe just a few less cars.
So which is it going to be?
As economies around the world start to open back up, we are deeply interested in the type of work world we are returning to.
While it is not, yet, systemic change in the way companies are building our work environment, at Attuned we are seeing real change in people’s motivation data from pre-Covid to these with-Covid times. Real shifts in intrinsic motivational needs amongst the professional office and creative classes have occurred because of Covid. Across thousands and thousands of data points we have on intrinsic motivation, we have seen:
Rising Needs
We’ve heard discussions, seen the news articles, that our teams require more feedback since Covid came in to our world. Attuned’s data clearly supports that. The need for feedback has gone up a solid 7% since we’ve shifted to a WFH environment.
People’s enhanced need for security is also intuitive. With all the surrounding uncertainty, worry if our company and jobs will still exist, many of us would like to have things more orderly and predictable.
The biggest change was an unexpected one: Rationality needs have jumped up by 10% across workers. For employee morale to be boosted bosses and companies need to explain logically, and clearly the reasons actions are being taken. They need to set expectations clearly. If you want better team well-being you would do well to take that extra moment to give your team details as to how and why decisions were reached, and what you, and they, should expect. It relates to transparency, and will also help satiate employee needs for security as well.
Dropping Needs
Another surprise from our data was that people’s needs for Social Relationships have dropped. The data tells a counter to the media. At Attuned we don’t have the answer as to why. Could it be because many of us are spending more time with our families? Making those Zoom calls with dear friends more regular? Satiating our needs for social relationships. Or is it the fear that the more social we are the more likely we will get Corona and pass it on to our loved ones? The data teases that something interesting seems to be happening.
These with-Covid working times are also not a period when people have rising needs to innovate or achieve big goals. Our data are averages, and we have to take averages in mind, considering the spread, and also take into account the changes for Innovation and Competition motivators are not dramatic percentage shifts, but it is interesting to see that people’s ambitions and creative desires are hedgehog-ing a bit. Not unexpected, but not the most intuitive data shift.
A New Working Environment
How Covid will change our working environments is still up in the air. But we are already seeing this mutually shared, dramatic event shifting the needs for employee well-being. The sudden move to WFH already brought significant management challenges, but if you want to know how to be a better manager, studying the data above will give you more perspective on what is likely happening within your teams. Of course, if you want to know exactly how Attuned can help you understand what motivates your team members you can take a quick tour of the product, here.
Covid will be changing the way we work for years to come. But today the data shows people’s motivational needs have changed. What is needed to make happy employees has changed. In this new era we expect the old adage of “happy employees are more productive” will prove truer than pre-Covid, separating the companies that can most quickly and thoroughly adapt their soft management skills.
Our vision here at Attuned is to make more meaningful work through intrinsic motivation. If we use the data above it will help managers on how to improve employee morale, and the understanding can also help set the groundwork for the soft management structures needed to create more balance in our lives, the ability to work in locations closer to nature, with more well-being, overall increasing the quality of worklife.
That is meaningful work.