Is a transactional attitude towards work problematic?

Nigel Cassidy: With more seeing their jobs as just a way or making money and easing back on commitment can you redesign work to remotivate people? I’m Nigel Cassidy and this is the CIPD Podcast. Let’s face it most employers will take as much dedication as we’re prepared to give but they don’t always get it. CIPD research suggests that post Covid work is becoming less central to our lives. Going above and beyond is no longer seen as a duty in exchange for a salary. Your boss may be a hugger but work isn’t family. Employees might just call it getting a better work life balance but for employers though it may be time to rethink job roles and expectations if they want people to reconnect. So our mission with our guests this month is to explore how an organisational development and design approach might help here. But before we meet them let’s just listen to actor Ron Livingstone. Here he is playing a demotivated company employee in the movie Office Space and unlike most workers he doesn’t even try to hide his feelings when meeting his bosses. [plays extract from film]. Well, as that comedy film neatly illustrates if people don’t find their work rewarding and actually benefit from the extra effort they put in well, there may be trouble ahead. It’s time for a rethink. Joining me now a consultant with long experience of helping organisations to bridge their performance gap he’s also coacher of the CIPD in Central London it’s Garin Rouch from Distinction Consulting. Hello.

Gavin Rouch: Hi. Thank you very much for having me.

NC: With him a CIPD research advisor who has amassed a lot of evidence around employee engagement and leads for the CIPD on the annual Good Work Index it’s Jake Young. Hi, Jake.

Jake Young: Morning Nigel.

NC: So Jake I’ll start with you. To what extent are you picking up on this rather transactional view at work that seems to be coming through?

JY: Yeah. So work centrality is something we’ve explored since the Good Word Index began in 2018. So the Good Work Index is our annual benchmark of job quality in the UK and we’ve looked at to what extent people see work as central within their lives. So couple of things in particular we’ve looked at firstly at the kind of perception of whether work is purely transactional. So whether it’s just for the money and this feeling has been slowly rising. It peaked last year in 2023 and it’s peaking actually again in 2024 with half of our sample feeling the work is simply for the money. And then alongside that we look at how willing people are to work harder than they need to in order to help their organisation. Again, changes are pretty small but this has hit a low in the last couple of years. So again, we’ve got around 50% of people who are willing to go the extra mile for their organisation. So there is a clear trend that is going on over the years and initially this might feel like quite a negative finding, I suppose. But actually, if we kind of think about work centrality on its own it’s not necessarily a negative thing.

So for most viewing work is just a part of their overall lives. You know it’s more significant for some people and less for others can be a really good way to create a healthy balance between their work life and their home life and to swich off outside of their work into protect their mental and physical health. But things do get a little bit more complicated when we start to look at things like employee engagement and the kind of meaning that people get from their work. So we do in the Good Work Index we do find that people are pretty engaged when it comes to work. So they have pretty good levels of enthusiasm, they’re emersed at work. Feelings of boredom, exhaustion are pretty comparatively pretty low. And this is really good.

You know we’ve found from other research that more engaged, more motivated staff are more likely to perform better. They’re more likely to be more satisfied. Less likely to want to leave their jobs. However, and I’ll let Garin jump in at some point shortly. I shouldn’t be too much longer. When we look at meaningful work things can become a little bit more troublesome. So we see that people tend to gain meaning at work from their contribution to their organisation. So they perceive their work as useful, valuable and important for their employers. But unfortunately, employers feel less positively about the impact of their work beyond this. So they’re less likely to feel that their work makes a positive difference to society. And they’re also less likely to experience higher levels of kind of internal intrinsic validation from their work, such as feeling inspired by either their own jobs or the purpose of their organisation.

So this does potentially pose a risk for employers and people professionals. So if people are identifying less with their organisation and see work as less central is it possible that their levels of engagement, commitment, motivation all those things could also slip. And then if we combine this with the fact that work is shown to have pretty mixed effects on people’s mental health this again, could cause a risk of unfulfilled and uninspired workers.

NC: Yeah, that’s great – you put a lot out there and given us a very good overview of all that. Let’s for the moment park this issue of how you may be leaning to go with this rather more transactional approach because of social factors and all kinds of other things. But Garin Rouch in your work are you seeing this trend? Because this idea of people saying, look, I’m not paid to do that. This is it's quite you because traditionally people have close friends at work. They perhaps meet a partner there, you make connections. You get your skills for your future career. It’s suddenly almost as if none of this matters. That work has no purpose beyond the salary.

GR: Yeah. I think it’s a really positive thing that the CIPD are starting this debate, it’s a debate that needs to be had in organisations and as Jake is really opening up there it’s multifaceted. So if we sort of look at within organisations. You now organisations are the micro causing of our society. You know it’s technologies our work practices all different things coming together in their messy glory. And I guess it depends where you sort of start looking at this. So the transitioning employment. Re-engineering in the 90s started to undo some of the loyalty that people had towards their organisations. Organisations to a great extent failed to put boundaries around people’s workloads and to a certain extend our employees – if you’re not going to do this for me and we’re going to have cosmetic wellbeing, maybe it’s time I need to protect myself.

So I guess the question you know when we go into organisations to what extent is this a conscious decision on behalf of employees? Are they consciously withdrawing their labour and saying, right, that’s it. To protect my identity, I need to have other interests and I can’t be defined by work. Or is this a defensive reaction because of the way in which organisations are being run. This is the only way I can literally protect myself from the relentless nature of change and growth that’s not necessarily linked to operational reality all those things as well. So I guess the mantra of organisational development is it depends. So it is really there is a lot of things that are actually going on within an organisation that is a huge impact. And all those wonderful things that add up to our culture can have a huge impact in terms of what does this transactional work look like in this organisation? And is it a bad thing?

JY: Garin is talking about different societal changes that kind of impact how people feel in the workplace. And I would say that the fact that this feeling appears to have grown since the pandemic is definitely no coincidence.  I think it’s quite easy to underestimate the impact that living in a really, kind of, uncertain state where you know people’s lives were at risk, people were fearful of various things. For the best part of two / three years had had on us both in our personal lives and in our working lives. So I think during that time people kind of had the opportunity to reconsider their priorities in life. So I guess it’s a kind of one simple way of putting it might be that people simply their priorities have simply shifted and they felt that you know I have other things to consider in my life now. As a result of such upheaval.

NC: Okay. So Garin, take this on for us. So engagement is dropping, performances of some team members whether or not they’re working remotely are rather doing the minimum so problems amounting. As on OD practitioner how do you discover whether there is this disengagement and whether it’s a problem and then start thinking about what you can do to change the nature of the jobs to re-engage people?

GR: Yeah, absolutely. Looking at it through an OD approach it’s important to look it through different lenses. The concern when you have data like this comes out is that we just don’t understand enough about the data. So sometimes data like this is a bit of a lag indicator. It’s like a build-up of things that have happened over time and they contributed to this as well. So the other concern is that when you get data like this we start to pathologize the individual. What’s wrong with the individual? Why are they starting to work in this transactional way that’s – is it impacting outputs and outcomes and productivity? If you look at a plant and it doesn’t grow we generally look at the system. You know where do we plant it; how much water did we give it? The temperature. But if we think about things like this then we start to go what’s wrong with the individual. Maybe there is something wrong with them. So it’s really important when you look at it from an organisational development perspective and look at it from a systems perspective which is how are the different factors contributing to it as well.

So if you think about it you know what is the order doing? What is it about them, you know, not scrutinising the ambitious targets that are given to them by senior leaders and saying, actually, does your resources actually match up to this? Are you stretching them too far? You know the senior managers that feel they have to deliver on these promises that have been made. There are managers that aren’t pushing back on decisions and actually putting this pressure onto their front-line staff. And then you’ve got frontline staff that are maybe practicing what’s the term? Structured antagonism. Such as purposeful silence where they actually, you know, what it doesn’t matter if I don’t say anything. So I’m just going to be quiet and I’m just going to withdraw my labour. So it’s really important that we look around what are the factors that are influencing it and making sure that we’re all taking our part of the responsibility here as well.

NC: Now, I know as long ago as 1980 job roles were kind of split up into core characteristics. You know jobs needed to be motivating. You needed skill variety, task identity significant, autonomy and feedback. Jake, I just wondered whether that traditional way of kind of deconstructing a job and making sure it has the elements that keep people engaged. Is that still useful?

JY: In short I think it is. I think motivation is quite a complex topic and construct because it’s a really well researched area. And there is so many, kind of, different theories that have been used over the years. But what I would say is that quite a lot of these theories are either outdated or widely discredited by the kind of body of evidence by scientific research. So for example there are two theories that have really persisted over the years. The Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory and Herzberg’s Motivational Hygiene Theory and these are no longer backed by any solid evidence. And actually, I did have a look at the Hackman and Oldham Job Characteristics Model and this is actually another outdated theory. However, there are some elements of it that still remain in our importance. So it is supported by some really solid evidence but the downside of it is that it fails to consider different context such as working in teams. So aspects of this have been included in a theory that’s called Self Determination Theory of Motivation. So this is a newer theory that is actually really well evidenced. And this basically says that we have three psychological needs. That when fulfilled enable us to kind of grow psychologically and enjoy better wellbeing.

So these are autonomy so that’s kind of having freedom of choice, freedom of choice in kind of how we work. Competence is another and that’s kind of having mastery of our work. And then relatedness which is having connection and belonging with the people that we work with. And there are some other really solid evidence-based theories out there which include some of those aspects that you mentioned. So for example feedback is really important as a basis of improvement. Autonomy as I said. I don’t think you can really overstate how important autonomy is. I think in this whole conversation empowering employees to kind of describe the ways in which to do their jobs is really important here too. You know improved engagement, improved motivation. Other factors include things like goal setting. So using smarter goals and then finally developing psychological safety. So this is basically ensuring group members feel safe to take risks and speak up without fear of judgment or rejection.

So I would say to kind of yeah, long answer short I think there are definitely some aspects which are really important in terms of building people’s motivation. But I think it's important if we look at from my kind of perspective looking at the evidence there are some theories that kind of need to be questioned.

NC: Okay. So moving some of these ideas through the organisational development and design process Garin, just take us on how do you build these in to creating a kind of working within teams, within organisations which is likely to make people feel a bit happier about their work and more engaged and go the extra mile again?

GR: Building on Jake’s point the thing about autonomy and by definition ownership as well – I think that’s a key area. You know if someone is working transactionally how do you start to rebuild that relationship? How do you sort of put the breadcrumbs down to lead them back into full engagement, as well? So there is that saying no-one washes a rental car. So how do you actually start to create that sense of ownership in an organisation?

So I guess some of the ways we do it. And you talked about design at the beginning of the programme and we have to be intentional in the way in which we design organisations. And often the people doing the designing don’t necessarily have access to the same theories and research that Jake has and that’s a real firewall that’s getting in the way here. Like all this great research is out in the academic field isn’t finding its way into the hands of managers and HR teams so that evidence approach is really important. So part of that design and it’s not necessarily about moving the organisation chart around it’s really thinking about how do we create autonomy and that’s and it’s often the delegation of power and decision making rights within an organisation and job crafting and giving people independence to do that. But that requires a real sophistication on the part of managers and there is some really scary statistics out there in terms of management capability at the moment.

Often we all hear about the good practices but on average a manager I think it’s called YouGov (?) waits ten years before it receives any intensive leadership development. And I think it’s 51% managers are overloaded by 51% in terms of capacity of workload. So if we want them to take on a more sophisticated way of working with their teams we’ve got to support them. The big thing is okay we’re going to make them more autonomous. Well, they don’t have the reps. And so, you say be autonomous and then people don’t take up the invitation and as a result they then disappointed and take the power back. 

A nice kind of metaphor to think about how you sort of delegate decision making rights and power in organisation is almost like an irrigation system. So it’s kind of thinking of it as water going down through the pipes and making sure that all of the power is given to all of the different places in the organisation where it actually needs to be situated. So power and decision making are situated in the right place. But the challenges that you get are often quite tough because senior managers can be quite territorial. They don’t necessarily want decision to be in certain places as well. So we have to be realistic and pragmatic in terms of how we go about doing it. But again. Remote work has been a big driver behind this I would hypothesise. And some of the research that we’re seeing is that traditional hierarchical, power driven, charismatic, management doesn’t work as well. And things such as shared leadership works better where leadership is led on a particular task based on experience capability and capacity as well. So there is lots of different approaches. I’m going to go back to it depends for each organisation.

NC: Okay. We’ll let you say that once more.

GR: Thank you.

NC: Jake Young I mean all this is about employment engagement and that in itself I’m going to term it’s been a big thing since the 1990s and everything from sort of rewards, you know big stuff like health insurance to free tickets to shows, career pathways, sales leaderboards liked or loathed by people depending on their jobs perhaps. Is there much evidence out there on the whole panoply of employee engagement whether that is a way of getting people engaged again?

JY: So we did a big review of employee engagement kind of looking what it is, how it can be measured – what kind of factors influence it. What kind of outcomes does it have? In terms of those sort of tactics that you mention I don’t know if there is a great deal of evidence but there are a number of factors that we found can predict engmagnet. So Garin was mentioning job – you mentioned organisational design but job design as well I think is really important.

So one thing particularly is called the Job Demands Resources Model and so that’s basically balancing the demands people face in their jobs and the resources that they have. So ensuring employees don’t feel kind of overwhelmed or overworked in their jobs and then providing them with the resources to perform effectively such as line manager and colleague support. Really quality feedback and again, autonomy to try and control their work environment. Those things are really important. Also, people management skills as well. Managers need to kind of foster engmagnet among their staff and Garin mentioned different types of leadership. Especially in a kind of transformative leadership way. So this means kind of inspiring them towards a goal or a vision that’s found to be particularly effective to improve engagement. But that’s not only on the part of managers they need themselves to feel empowered through things like training to actually kind of conduct this sort of people management authentically and effectively. 

And then you mention interventions as well. I just wanted to touch on there is a kind of small body of evidence for things like mindfulness techniques. Other things like that that may help improvement engagement but I should say that the evidence if kind of fairly primitive on those kind of technique.

NC: I was going to say it depends on the individual, doesn’t it? Because I’m feeling hostile already as soon as you said mindfulness.

JY: Yeah.

NC: But that is not universal. Work can be stressful and different things work for different people. I just want to take up something you said earlier with Garin and that is the fact that on the one hand this is where people sort of clawing back different work life balance. And that it might be a good thing. If you talk about a transactional relationship I mean I work freelance in the main. And I really strive to do a good job for the people I work with and I would sort of slightly argue that commitment is a transaction. The fact that there is a transaction involved might actually mean people do a really good job. I mean contractors are not all awful and sustain many organisations.

GR: Absolutely. If you look at it from an identity perspective what happens basically is that when things go wrong at work if work is so central to your life then it has an enormous impact on you. It becomes more difficult to draw boundaries around hours and that as well. Whereas often contractors will have a healthier balance in terms of how they approach work. It’s really focused time often they will be balancing the needs of different clients at the same time too as well. So it is that kind of real focus that they can actually have and making sure that things stay within perspective. I guess the other things that contractors can have that others don’t have is that they can leave the building at the end of the day and they don’t feel like they need to go back in. Whereas, if those internal relationships are really difficult you know if they’re feeling that they don’t have a voice in an organisation then an employee can often feel quite trapped.

NC: So Jake, supposing an organisation is done some of the things which Garin has suggested how can you kind of tell that people are starting to re-engage again? Is it work measuring?

JY: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I would say 100%. I think there is some fairly clear measures. Some well used measures that you can use to think about engagement. So engagement itself is quite an interesting concept because in our research on it we distinguished between employee engagement which is a kind of broader term under which sit things like commitment, identification with the organisation and motivation. And then work engagement which is more specific. And in order to measure work engagement the clear dominant scale is called the UTREICHT Work Engagement Scale and this is one that we really recommend. It’s commonly used it’s really robust it’s been around for years. It has different numbers of scales if you want to be more specific. Or kind of less detailed I suppose. So this kind of looks at the psychological state of engagement by asking about three keys areas and I think this kind of gets to your question. If you want to understand how engaged people are. So it's essentially looking at vigour towards work. Dedication towards work and absorption into work activity.

So I can give you an example at the kind of questions that people would answer. So the first one would be, at my work I feel bursting with energy. So that’s measuring vigour. I’m enthusiastic about my job - dedication and I’m emersed in my work - absorption. So again, I don’t want to go into too much detail into the scale but I think that’s a really, kind of really robust, rigorous and quite straight forward way that organisations can easily administer to their staff and kind of get a sense of whether these interventions and practices are actually making much of a difference when it comes to engagement.

GR: Yeah, and if I can just come in on that as well. Because the measures are really important but I’m not really sure that managers know what to do with the data. So often we do the events and say, who measures engagement? Great and then who does anything about it? Not many. So you know fundamentally I think sometimes we can overcomplicate things. You just need to ask them and you just need to involve them. And I think probably one of the most underestimated capabilities in modern contemporary organisations is the ability to facilitate and really open up spaces where people can actually feel like they can input and a change actually happens. So you know things where you start giving them safe spaces to ask questions about what’s going on. To give them feedback. To help them feel informed where they’re involved early and often in decision making. That’s all these things are absolutely critical.

So one thing that we do regularly building on the work of Professor Julie Hodges is a change readiness assessment. So what we do is we use it as a dialogue. We do quite a lot of dialogues you can change. And that’s where before they do a change we actually go in and ask them how ready are you before we take this new strategic direction? Do you buy into it? Do you think that the benefits outweigh the pain that’s going to come with this? And all those kind of things can really start to help people feel involved and a sense of ownership and a sense of inclusion and just the act of talking – I think sometimes that can be a little bit lost and it is difficult when you have organisations of a certain size. But you can facilitate it in a way that people can feel involved or at least feel represented as well. I think the research is incredibly useful because it starts to give us clues about what the problems might be. But Kurt Lewin says we never understand a system until we change it.

So if we go for wholescale change it’s an enormous amount of risk and resource that goes into it. So we have a hypothesis we think that people are being transactional because of these particular reasons. So in organisations it's really beneficial often to do pilot groups or to experiment and therefore iterate as well. So and even in small organisations you can try a new way of work – you can try job crafting with a particular team and then compare and contrast with the performance against another team as well and what that does that allows you to get some insight into – okay, is this the thing and how are people responding to it and getting their feedback. And then you can really start to work on it as well.

NC: Do you think you need to be a very large organisation?

GR: No, you can be a small organisation and you can just try it with individual teams to see how they work with this and obviously you need their informed consent to make sure they feel happy with it. But it just gets an idea that okay, so these particular interventions are having this impact as well and I guess the other thing about OD is that you intervene at different levels. So it is that thing we intervene at different levels and we just see what the different reactions are. And we try just different ways of working. And going back to Jake’s rigorous and robust way of working we measure it to the best of our ability. Both qualitatively and quantitatively. As well.

NC: And of course, before making these changes Jake Young you need to talk to people because I hear so often people will have left the job without even explaining why they feel demotivated.

JY: Yeah. Absolutely. As Garin said I think getting people involved at the earliest stage possible when you’re bringing in interventions and kind of any organisational change is really important. I think that really helps kind of create those shared goals and just to get people’s feedback throughout the whole process up and down the organisation. Yeah, I think that’s really key to kind of bringing these changes.

GR: Yeah – there was a fascinating story done by Paul Knott in 2002 and he said he liked decisions at strategic level over 20 years and they’ve just found that all the data shows that participative decision making out performs top down. So even if it’s just not from a transactional perspective it’s just from an actual output perspective as well. So I guess all of the things that we’re sharing in terms of evidence based here don’t just impact the world being an employee but they actually have a hard tangible outcome on the output of the organisation as well. And I this is not soft and fluffy stuff that we’re talking about here. This is organisation performance at the highest level.

NC: But particularly difficult Garin if an individual’s values and goals in life are in conflict with the organisations. I mean that can happen, can’t it? And that’s quite difficult to resolve.

GR: Yeah. It can and people with the organisations as well for different reasons as well. So you know Jake was talking earlier which was a really good point which is about our peer to peer relationships. So that’s often that kind of sense of belonging. So you may not necessarily agree with the strategic direction and many people have to work to live. But if you have those bonds within your team and that’s done by design and done intentionally then people can actually feel like a flourishing member of the team. They’re making their contribution. It does make a difference and they do feel significant as well. So also, organisations you know they don’t always espouse their values very clearly so it’s not very easy to align yourselves with either anyway. Often the values that they talk about that sit on the wall behind the reception they’re not the values. They’re not the values. The values are actually something else.

NC: There is a whole programme around that – where this leaves organisational goals and values. So we’ll save that for another day. So bringing this together then so kind of final question really for both of you and that is that starting with Jake have we seen a fundamental shift in what organisations can reasonability expect out of people and what kind of work life balance people expect. In other words, can we work with where we are now or do we have to have a bit of give and take on both sides if the sort of work contract is to continue successfully?

JY: I would say the evidence suggests that there has definitely been a shift. As I said people’s needs and priorities appear to have shifted definitely accelerated by the pandemic I would say but as I said earlier and just to kind of wrap up I don’t think lower work centrality or feeling like work is a more transactional relationship is necessarily a bad thing. I think it’s more about prioritising the other aspects of job quality and making sure you kind of harness the potential of those I suppose. So trying to really keep people engaged. Allow employees flexibility and autonomy to control their work environment and then provide managers and leaders with training to kind of encourage and demonstrate and manage their staff to develop really strong supportive relationship. So kind of focusing on those things as opposed to worrying too much about the prospect of lower work centrality I would say is a positive way to go.

NC: And maybe Garin organisations are going to have to work harder at convincing people of the real values to their lives and careers of what they can gain from the workplace.

GR: Absolutely, yeah. But they need to make time to design by intention. Things like remote work have been approached in a really haphazard way in many ways and naturally so because it was a really involved situation so it was about how can we intentionally design organisations the way that we work? Engage our people in the process of actually designing it but also investing in the capability of our leaders to sort of manage in this more sophisticated way. But the word is investment. It’s not a cost and I think sometimes that’s a bit of confusion that’s happened. The things that Jake was talking about the importance of L&D and the role that plays in engagement as well is huge. And that investment has to start with leaders as well.

NC: Brilliant. Well, many thanks to both Garin Rouch from Distinction Consulting and Jake Young CIPD Research Advisor. Quick mention of last month’s podcast HRs next top operating model – great title that. Which featured the HR industry guru like figure of Dave Ulrich whose model shaped how much of the profession has been organised for the last three decades. Do catch that addition if you can the guests were really praised for it on socials. And indeed, we hope this addition will prove equally popular and helpful. So please subscribe. Keep spreading the word about these podcasts but until next from me Nigel Cassidy and all at CIPD it’s goodbye.